THE SCANDAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
The
engines of anti-democratic subversion have been grinding away
for decades. The signs and portents all around us. The emergence
of the scourge of political correctness and the lockstep leftist
agitprop of the mainstream media, for example, are sure indicators
of advancing democratic collapse. According to Reporters Without
Borders, Canada ranks 18th and the U.S. 41st in its World Press
Freedom Index -- a rather shabby performance for ostensibly
enlightened democratic nations. Political disinformation has
come to supplant journalistic integrity in a sustained effort
to steer the electorate toward the socialist agenda of anti-individualism,
bigger government, state welfarism and bureaucratic expansion.
Another
important way of facilitating the leftward drift is to mutilate
the historical archive or reject the value and influence of
history altogether. The historical register which binds a nation
to its past and creates a holistic sense of national identity
thus becomes a non-factor in the political and cultural zeitgeist.
In Canada, for example, we have a postcolonial prime minister
who believes that Canada is not determined by its history --
“There is no core identity… in Canada,” Justin
Trudeau bloviates, ignorant or dismissive of the institutions
developed by classical British liberalism in the country, namely
“freedom to associate, speak, create, and to be entrepreneurial.”
Similarly, Title IX in the U.S. has materially watered down
school curricula to the extent that students no longer have
a secure grasp of their country’s history, or any grasp
whatsoever -- although the process of epistemic decay dates
back many years.
In
line with this movement of social engineering, importing third-world
refugees with no experience of democratic institutions, particularly
from the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, and seeding these
immigrants in vote-sensitive regions guarantees loyalty to the
progressivist, anti-democratic project and renders the eventual
destination of one-party rule increasingly probable. The Hart-Celler
1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, promoted by Ted Kennedy,
and Canada’s policy of multiculturalism, adopted by former
PM Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971, opened the floodgates. The
flood is now in full tide.
There
is yet another weapon in the ideological arsenal of the left
which has been extremely effective in forcing compliance with
and muzzling opposition to its homogenizing diktats. Official
and quasi-official bodies that purport to defend “human
rights” and that enjoy legal recourse to implement their
decisions are perhaps the most potent agencies enforcing conformity
to the prevalent ideology. This is because they have the power
to levy onerous fines and judgments sufficient to damage and
even lay waste the lives and careers of those who run afoul
of their manifold proscriptions. They are the ringwraiths of
the dark kingdom. Their websites, however, are golden; after
all, protecting “human rights” sound like a noble
endeavor. But there is a clandestine flavor to them too. Few
know the trivial nature of many of the complaints and the drastic
penalties levied for even inadvertent misdemeanors or honest
mistakes. Passive or unsuspecting individuals will feel the
wrath of these ersatz magistracies. At the same time, those
who are cognizant of their sway and peremptory intent make sure
to keep their heads down and act as they are expected to, cowering
beneath the shadow of punitive reprisal. Compliance with the
progressivist orthodoxy is thus assured.
We
see how these bodies work in the “preponderance of evidence”
clause in Title IX with respect to university adjudication of
sexual misconduct claims. The model discards the “burden
of proof”/”presumption of innocence” core
in civil justice proceedings and, as Joseph Cohn writes in FIRE,
“reduces evidentiary standards,” failing to “take
into account many due process protections [that] ensure the
basic fairness of trials.” It all comes down to what “seems
likely” instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt”
as the warrant for judicial miscarriage gradually enters the
mindset of our cultural authorities. The latitude for abuse
is chasm wide.
This
powerful bureaucratic adjunct to the progressivist war machine
in my country goes by the name of Social Justice Tribunals,
within which operates the Human Rights Tribunal, a quasi-judicial,
provincially based Star Chamber in which designated “victim
groups” -- racial minorities, Muslims, women, female students,
“misgendered” people, former criminals, social outliers,
disabled persons (which could mean anyone suffering from stress,
dyslexia, memory problems, etc.) -- are pro forma prioritized
and the most frivolous and untenable suits filed by malcontents
are favorably adjudicated. In a typical instance, a prospective
renter felt so “broken” and “alone”
when he was turned down by the landlord that he won substantial
monetary compensation from the unsuspecting offender. In truth,
it is the respondent who is “alone” and the system
that is “broken.” $5000 plus “prejudgment
interest” for feeling hurt seems like a profitable exchange
and a tantalizing incentive for others to invest in the complaint
industry.
According
to the Human Rights Legal Support Centre, perceived “negative
treatment” involving “personal characteristics”
is “enough to prove discrimination under the Code.”
The list of such “personal characteristics” protected
under the code is daunting. Nor is there any way of knowing
what punishments will be inflicted upon the accused since there
are no sentencing guidelines. The whims of the tribunal are
decisive and, as we’ve seen, the monetary penalties it
habitually imposes are exorbitant. The accused know they had
better extend their line of credit. As one adjudicator reasons
(article 77 of the judgment in question), “Economic interests
and rights do not trump human rights . . . ”
Ay,
there’s the rub. Human rights, of course, are anything
the tribunal wishes to regard as such, and rarely if ever apply
to the defendant, whose freedom of speech and source of income
are at the mercy of immoral and avaricious accusers. And they
are myriad, as are the decent and bewildered objects of the
tribunal’s legalistic depravity. I have surveyed many
cases of outrageous decisions manifesting arbitrary rulings
and outright bias on the part of the adjudicators. The fact
that the complainant is generally provided with free legal counsel,
a privilege not afforded to the defendant, in itself tells us
all we need to know about the skewed and appalling nature of
this kangaroo court. (Full disclosure: I have a personal stake
in the matter, as someone dear to me -- I have been advised
to refrain from explicit comment -- is now being summoned before
the tribunal in a case resting on “subjective feelings”
and a series of wholly provable misrepresentations).
Given
this penumbral court’s record, the verdicts handed down
are pretty well predictable. The plaintiff, no matter how absurd
or extortionate or false the suit, almost invariably wins. Even
his or her withdrawal from a case is a form of victory as the
defendant is saddled with prohibitive legal costs. In Shakedown:
How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human
Rights, Ezra Levant reports on innumerable such suits. Those
who put up principled resistance are more than likely to find
that the Social Justice tank will roll right over them. Levant
himself has had to pay over $100,000 in legal fees for defending
his right to publish the Danish cartoons and lost his print
newspaper the Western Standard into the bargain. What
we are remarking is an ancillary, though critical, formula for
the advancement of social despotism, the ideological crux of
the leftist agenda that functions under the sign of “justice.”
But as historian Curtis McManus asks in Clio’s Bastards,
“what kind of Justice is it that tells us there are only
certain things that human beings can say, think, and feel?”
Such “purging and cleansing” are intellectual crimes
and cultural degradations, “starting points for tyranny.”
It
is impermissible to say this in the current cultural milieu,
but we are moving by seven league strides toward a dispensation,
as beleaguered University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson
explains, in which the weaker members of society -- the low
achievers, the dysfunctional, the comparatively unsuccessful,
the resentful -- eventually replace their betters in the seats
of preference.
It
comes as no surprise, then, that our “social justice”
types present themselves as paladins fighting for the downtrodden;
in reality, they are unaccountable partisans and well paid drones
in thrall to the Dunning-Kruger syndrome, a condition in which
the intellectually and ethically defective overestimate their
level of competence and intelligence. It shows. In accordance
with leftist doctrine, the outcome of their efforts is to make
the productive strata of society falter and decline. Businesses,
which supply the tax base from which tribunal remoras draw their
salaries, can be forced into failure as a result of preposterous
and unjust claims. Meanwhile the hundreds of millions of dollars
wasted annually to maintain this parasitical institution constitute
a blight on the fiscal conscience of the nation.
No
matter. The Human Rights juggernaut persists in carrying out
its mandate. By brandishing the cleaver of ruinous fines and
professional umbrage that can seriously disable or even destroy
a person, family, or business, Social Justice casts its real
victims into a social or economic oubliette from which there
is little chance of escape. Tyrannical regimes ensure their
rule over their citizenry by violent means, including summary
execution. Here, no need to deprive people of their lives; their
livelihoods will do.
Unfortunately,
the organizational dynamic of the left is difficult to resist
as shifting coalitions among allied groups -- what Samuel Eldersveld
in Political Elites in Modern Societies called “stratarchy”
-- inevitably cohere around a strong conventual leadership and
a sense of cultural momentum initiated by that leadership and
its affiliates and subsets. Camouflaging its true nature --
the practice of legislative coercion, the crushing of dissent
by the threat of social ostracism, job termination, and crippling
financial deprivations, and the advancement of bureaucratic
collectivization at the expense of individual self-reliance
and enterprise -- the progressivist consortium flourishes under
the rubrics of freedom, compassion, social responsibility and
“Human Rights.”
Ironically,
what are lost in the process are human rights. And once human
rights grow extinct, the left will have consolidated its political
hegemony.
