Yes, Mr. Levant is correct to raise the spectre of Pavlik Morozov: I was certainly taught in school to live up to his example. But that was on the other side of the iron curtain! There is no room for twisted crap like that in our schools now!
Let you be the first to read it!
I have a gun.
I even volunteered in a school, teaching children how to use a gun, just like mine.
A glue gun, that is.
I have a whole bunch of glue sticks in an ammo box I bought at an army surplus store – partly because I like puns and partly because it is efficient.
I also own a tape gun – it makes wrapping presents more efficient.
And I have two staple guns. (OK, one is my hubby’s, but that makes at least half of it mine, no?)
My kids own guns, too!
From the air-zooka (which ‘shoots’ air, if you are not familiar with it) through a marshmallow gun to water guns…
But if I wanted to own a firearm – an actual gun for shooting bullets – I would not feel obligated to tell ‘the state’. Why? Because I believe, to the core of my being, that the Magna Carta gives me the right to carry whatever arms I think I need to protect my person, family and property. Nothing – no law – can, in my never-humble-opinion – abrogate this natural right to protect myself.
It is precisely because I have the right to carry weapons that police has the power to carry weapons: they derive that right from me, and you, and all the other citizens. Since the government acts as our proxy, it cannot do what each and every one of us does not have the right to do, irrespective of the government.
This equation goes both ways: since the state is acting on our behalf, it cannot do anything we are not free to do. Therefore, if some agents of the state do carry firearms, it therefore follows that each and every citizen has that very same right. If we did not have that right, then the government agents would have nowhere to get that right from.
I recognize I am not expressing this eloquently – following is a video that does a much better job of it:
When all the rhetoric is washed away, at its core, this is about self-ownership.
This is an important point – and one that all politicians ought to be reminded of, often and firmly.
I am not an economist, so there is no way I am going to articulate this eloquently or even remotely well, but…I would not be myself if I didn’t give it a shot.
There is an old joke – very old – that could get people sent to jail if they said a variation of it back behind the iron curtain, where I grew up:
What is the fastest way to get rid of all the sand in the Sahara desert?
Create a government department with the sole purpose of supplying sand to the Sahara. Give it a steering committee, a 5 year plan and lots of money and power to enforce policies. For a little while, nothing will happen. Then: BOOM! Sand will be more scarce in the Sahara than meat is in butcher shops!
(If you are one of the younger readers who does not remember what life behind the iron curtain was like, let me just say that butcher shops usually had very, very little to offer. If a supply of meat was even rumoured to be coming in, people would stand in lines for hours, sometimes lining up all night just so they may be one of the first few in line in the morning because the supplies were so meager that even with limits per customer, only the first few people in line would get to buy any meat. Bread and milk were usually available, but again, even with bread, the supply would run out before the demand. I remember days when the limit would be set at one quarter loaf of bread per customer, so that my mom would go line up and send me to line upseparately, so we’d get half a loaf between us. No kidding. We had money – but there was no ‘stuff’ to buy with it.)
‘Governments creating jobs’ is one of those easy to fall into fallacies. Like ‘the broken window’ fallacy:
The fact is that governments do not just ‘have money’ to spend: their money comes from taxes, current or future. Taxes are taken from people who earn it by the threat of force: these people now no longer have that money to spend to look after themselves and their family.
Ah, say government spending proponents, but what if people want to save their money instead of spending it? That would be bad for the economy and that is why governments must take it from them and spend it!
Isn’t that just a little oppressive? And arrogant?
A government is supposed to represent the people and do the people’s bidding – not force people to do the government’s bidding!
The suggestion that governments should spend the people’s money because people don’t want to spend it themselves is illustrative of how the relationship between the citizens and our government has been inverted: insted of being our servant, the government has become our master, forcing us to do what we do not want to do.
That we are proposing ‘government stimulus spending’ and ‘government creating jobs’ as desirable actions should give us a moment of pause to consider what this implies about our relationship to our governments and the status of our civil liberties!
Over the weekend, this video, purported to be from ‘Anonymous’, was released. It demands that the Canadian Minister, Vic Toews, remove bill C-30 (which would permit civil servants unlimited snooping powers on the citizens via the internet without judicial oversight) and that he step down immediately.
The following video also purports to be from ‘Anonymous’. As I have no connection to that group, I have no idea if it is authentic. However, I do think it is worth posting because it raises several issues worth further discussion:
This video raises the connection between the desire by various governments to regulate arms and to regulate the internet.
This is a deeper connection that one may think, at first glance. But, deep down, both are attempts to take away the citizen’s ability to protect themselves – including, if necessary, to resist their government. Both are ways in which governments make their citizens less secure, more isolated, and more afraid of their government.
Even if you are not as libertarian in your views as I am (I think that monopoly control over infrastructure – even, or perhaps especially, information infrastructure – is perilous to civil liberties), it is easy to see how governments are threatened by citizenry that is difficult to control and willing and able to oppose them.
Firearms are a means of physical self-defense and an equalizer between the strong and the weak. Even a small woman can protect herself from a rapist with the use of a gun: her physical safety is no longer dependant solely on the timely response of the state to come to her aid. This threatens the government monopoly on the enforcement of laws: as every monopoly’s natural reaction would be, the government’s reaction is to restrict this competition.
Let’s be clear about this: government ‘regulation’ of firearms is not about increasing public safety by having many well trained, well armed citizens available in public spaces who would be able to stop law-breakers and thus increase public safety. To the contrary: it is always specifically designed to restrict gun ownership, use, and the very presence of privately owned guns in public spaces. This intolerance on the part of government of guns in private hands – even though this increases public safety – is indicative of the government’s disrespect for its citizenry, with the goal to increase government coercive powers at the root of all ‘arms regulations’.
Information is a weapon and a powerful one.
So is anonymous speech.
The internet enables both.
As a matter of principle, anonymous speech is necessary for the preservation of the very freedom of speech. For example, The Federalist Papers could never have been published had their authors not had absolute anonymity at the time of publication! The bigger the government is, the more dangerous it is to speak up against it openly. Without anonymous speech, governments do indeed become more totalitarian and more tyrannical in nature: this cycle has been repeated so often, it is blatant.
Yet, the ever-growing governments in the formerly-free world now wish to have complete and unfettered access to the information which would identify each and every internet user: to be able to attach a name to every sentence uttered on the internet, from seeking sensitive advice at an online support group to dissenting political speech!
Of course, the governments are also increasing citizen surveillance on so many fronts… There will soon be no arena where we do have ‘presumption to privacy’, not even in our homes and certainly not anywhere else. So, the whole ‘getting a warrant’ might be a mute issue…
Technology is beautiful – but it is a tool, to be used for good or evil. It is necessary that we understand these tools because our society will need to evolve along with them. What am I talking about?
As new technologies arise, we will need to develop laws to govern their use. However, these laws (all laws, really) ought to be focused on protecting the civil libeties of individual citizens – not legitimizing the ways that governments and big business can circumvent them!
The reason we have police is to uphold the laws of the land. That is, they are the instrument of force the State uses against its civilian population to maintain its monopoly on lawmaking within their territory. Basic, simple and clear, right?
The only legitimate role for a police force is to uphold the law – equally and without discrimination.
The only legitimate role for a police officer is to uphold the laws within the policing framework, and it is each individual officer’s personal responsibility to ensure they are not upholding the laws unequally or obeying illegal orders. This is essential because it is the front-line police officers who are the agents of the state within this: that is why they are the only ones who can safeguard this powerful force from corruption.
When exactly did the role of the police become re-defined from ‘enforcing the law of the land’ to ‘maintaining public peace’?
Because ‘maintaining public peace’ is not the same thing as ‘upholding the laws of the land’. If a crowd is upset by the presence of a witch, the easiest, most cost-effective course of action for someone ‘maintaining public peace’ is to simply burn the witch!
Most moral people would have a problem with this approach…
Yet, this is exactly what the OPP are doing in Caledonia: faced with an angry mob, they target the person the mob is angry at instead of maintaining order by upholding the laws of the land!
People who are willing to tolerate this approach to ‘maintaining peace’, who are ‘keeping their heads down’ in the conviction this will stop the mob from going after them should remember that in Eastern and Central Europe, the witch hunters sometimes killed every man, woman and child in a village they thought was infected with witchcraft.
The ‘peace of the tomb’ is not something our society ought to be striving for. Yet that is the logical result of the type of policing the OPP is practicing in Caledonia and many other places in Ontario!
(My apologies – embedding decided not to work in this post, though I have no idea why, it’s not like I haven’t done it in several other posts just today…)
Following is an email I received from Maryam Namazie of One Law For All, reporting on the event and supplying some excellent links. Congratulations on a successful event – and thank you to each and every person who participated and/or helped spread the word: this is one fight we must not back down from!!!
One Law for All held a successful rally in defence of free expression on Saturday 11 February 2012 opposite the Houses of Parliament. Hundreds braved the cold weather to join the rally at Old Palace Yard.
The rally followed several incidents in London recently where freedom of expression was curtailed in favour of fear of causing offence. In one incident, a talk on sharia law by One Law for All’s Anne Marie Waters was cancelled following threats of violence. Rhys Morgan was told by his school to remove a picture of Jesus and Mo from his Facebook page – a picture he had used in solidarity with the University College London Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society who had been asked by their student union to remove the same image. Both UCL and the London School of Economics have since passed draconian motions which will further restrict religious criticism or satire at their schools.
Speakers at the rally included A C Grayling, Nick Cohen, Caroline Cox, Gita Sahgal, Keith Porteous Wood, and Rhys Morgan.
The event was sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science UK and featured Richard Dawkins who told the crowd to ‘stop being so damn respectful’ and that without freedom of speech, society would be a ‘scientific, technological, moral dark age’.
Maryam Namazie of One Law for All closed the rally by remembering those, around the world, who are fighting for freedom of expression, often at cost of their lives.
Actions to mark the occassion were also held in other cities, including Germany, Portugal and South Africa. Some highlights included a solidarity rally in Warsaw, Poland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqRBW7zGflk&fb_source=message, a fundraising dinner for One Law for All in Melbourne, Australia and the start of a campaign by Women’s Initiative for Citizenship and Universal Rights in France to denounce discrimination faced by women due to the application of unfair laws in France.
As a follow up to the day, One Law for All has initiated a campaign in defence of 23 year old writer, Hamza Kashgari, who faces execution in Saudi Arabia for tweeting about Mohammad, Islam’s prophet. To support the campaign, click here: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/freedom-for-saudi-writer-hamza-kashgari/.
2. To donate to the work of One Law for All, please either send a cheque made payable to One Law for All to BM Box 2387, London WC1N 3XX, UK or pay via Paypal: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/donate/. We need regular support and also for supporters to commit to giving at least £5-10 a month via direct debit. You can find out more about how to join the 100Club here: http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/donate/.
I received an email which I would like to reproduce in its (almost) entirety, because it not only speaks for itself, it also includes the most-important links….and, it does raise a ray of hope!
Here it is, in its (almost) entirety (I only redacted a phone number):
1. Just days after our Queen’s Park news conference –‘Ending Race-Based Policing: The Caledonia Act\,’ – where we were joined by speakers from the pro-Israel Never Again Group and the International Free Press Society, MPP Toby Barrett has issued a call for strong action re the Caledonia occupation, and praised our efforts and ideas for reaching a resolution…
“Barrett credits Gary Mchale and CANACE for keeping the issue alive in the media and in the limelight, suggesting a lot of McHale’s ideas have been ‘pretty good’.” They include having more oversight from the Ontario Ombudsman with respect to the OPP and more protection for whistleblowers in the Police service.
Oh, I know I cannot write this up in a way to do this topic justice – mostly because it sends my blood pressure so dangerously high. After all, blind rage is the only reasonable response to a minister claiming that those whodare to voice reservations about a proposed law that would make mincemeat out of civil liberties are no better than child molesters.
Because that is exactly what he is saying.
OK – I’m about to loose my temper…again…and not finish this post…
ARRRRGGGHHHH!
Resorting to the ‘do it or you hate children and kick puppies’ is the last resort of a bully who knows he cannot defend his position based on the issues!
AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!!
YES! It actually IS supposed to be difficult to deprive people of their liberties: that is why cops have to follow all them silly rules!!! Taking the rules away will not make one child safer, while at the same time, it will make all of us a little less safe!
THAT is the root of the problem: the system lacks accountability!
Actually, that article just might explain a lot about the minister’s attitude: they have already started to build a huge electronic surveillance system. Parts of it have been operational for years!
All the bluster now is to hide that they have as yet to pass the laws to make it legal…
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 