John Kelly

The Web is a community.  Blogs are coffee shop conversations in a virtual reality.  They are the arguments, stories and laughter we share in a planetary cyber café.  Would the police have arrested Mr. Kelly, the accused in this case, if they had overheard him making similar remarks to some friends over cappuccino and biscotti?  I strongly suspect that the answer would be no.

The cornerstone of their case will be the obstruction of a peace officer in the execution of his duty of his duty.  This is a serious offence and certainly warrants criminal charges.  It is alleged that Mr. Kelly interfered with potential witnesses.  The Calgary Herald reports:

Much more than this should be necessary to charge someone with obstruction.  I fail to see how this would hamper police investigating a crime and so I expect police to explain to all of us clearly and concisely exactly how this action interfered substantially with their investigation.  .

In public service it is never enough to act correctly.  You must be seen to be acting correctly.  Perception is everything in the public domain.  This episode smacks of intimidation.  The CBC reports:

Why go to such lengths to uncover an obscure law?  It begins to sound like Calgary Police found Mr. Kelly to be a right pain in the ass and wanted to show him.   The Calgary Police do themselves or their fellow police services no favour by proceeding with this prosecution.  It makes us all wonder just what they have to be afraid of and unveils the lack of a real freedom in this country.  A revelation I would welcome far more than they.

I know that many out there will think my little choo-choo has finally gone around the bend.  Have I slipped into madness?  To think that the government staged burning police cars and smashing windows is just insane, right?  And that is exactly why governments get away with it.  It is insane.  But let’s look at the most important evidence:  the motive.

The first measure of the veracity of a conspiracy theory is motive.  This is where most conspiracy theories fall apart.  If their is no compelling reason to conspire to do something why go to all the trouble and risk?  Take the Kennedy assassination for instance.  This conspiracy has been around for 47 years now but the problem with every scenario is the why.  Kennedy was in trouble politically.  Why waste a bullet and drawing all that attention on a president that was about to become another one term wonder.  But in the case of the G20 the motives are strong, compelling and multiple.

First there was the enormous cost of the security operation.  While it certainly is the least important of the motives it is still compelling.  An election is almost certain within the next 5 to 12 months.  Having spent over a billion dollars on security how could the Conservative party face the electorate if nothing very notable had happened?  This is a variation on the old saying ‘What if they threw a war and nobody showed up?’ In this case what if they spend all this money and the protesters don’t cause enough damage.  With Canadians suffering economically the Conservatives could not afford to be seen to be spending money frivolously.  Especially not after FakeLakeGate.  The only way to be sure that the protest would get out of hand and frighten Canadians was for police agents to physically start the process.  After all you can’t trust a bunch of tree-hugging, hippie, leftist peaceniks to start a decent riot now can you.

This brings us to the second motive:  frightening Canadians.  In the pages of this blog and billions of others around the globe people like me have been warning of the impending security, financial and environmental reckoning.  Even the Pentagon report to the Bush administration stated clearly that this planet will not be able to sustain a population of more than 3 billion people by 2100.  That is less than half of today’s global population and less than a third of the 9.1 billion projected for 2050.  The Pentagon estimate I should add is the most generous of all I have encountered.  Most others estimate a maximum sustainable population of around one billion and a few even less.  The lowest estimated sustainable population for 2100 that I have come across was approximately 100 million.  Today there are a few hundred thousand climate refugees.  Within a few short years there will be millions and then billions.  James Lovelock suggests we built barricades and heighten security if we happen to be among the fortunate to live in a part of the globe that will still support human life.  To do this we must end this dalliance with democracy.  But we may not have to worry about that.  The financial and security reckonings may preempt the ecological.  Spillover from Iraq or Afghanistan or more likely both has the potential to draw in major powers resulting in large fast population reduction with the added turmoil, dislocation, lingering deaths of such a war destabilizing much of what survives.  And the financial meltdown has only begun.  It will play a role in the timing and ferocity of planetary ecological degradation and destabilization of global security.  The unwavering faith of our leaders in the American economic model shows their intellectual inability to conceptualize anything else thanks to a battered and bankrupt education system rather than the strength of the system.  Laissez-faire capitalism is a chimera.  It has failed every time it has been attempted.  But this time it has been pushed farther and the very institutions that society had created over the centuries to protect itself from the worst consequences have been systematically dismantled or undermined by the priesthood of the New Right.

Government officials may deny the inevitability of these events.  They may assist their lackeys in the main stream media to foster confusion.  But at the highest levels they know as well as I do that these events will take place.  Their plan or assumption is that they will be among the survivors and the rest of us be damned.  To do that they must heed Lovelock and end democracy.  To seize power arbitrarily would trigger a backlash.  Too messy and uncertain.  Much more effective to convince Canadians to surrender their rights and freedoms in the name of security.  A quick survey of the letters to the editor in support of the police actions in Toronto should prove beyond a doubt that the tactic is working.  Canadians seem more than willing to surrender everything they say they fought for in the world wars and are supposedly fighting for in Afghanistan.  What irony to send troops half way around the world to fight for a value we do not prize at home.  The G20 events in Toronto had a powerful effect on the unsophisticated and uninformed.  We will see the anti-terrorism laws renewed expanded when they next come up for review and we will see a general and substantial increase in police powers over the next five years.  The G20 protests will be as powerful a symbol in the hands of Canadian elites as 9/11 was to American elites as they stripped the liberty from Land of Liberty.  They needed it and they got it because they did it.  As simple as that.  Any who question rising authoritarianism will be shown pictures of burning police cars as Americans who question are shown the images of 9/11 and in an earlier generation on another continent those who questioned were reminded of the Reichstag fire until the die was cast and they could be silenced more effectively.

The final motive is chaos.  In chaos it is a human tendency to cling to the known rather than fly to things we know not of as Shakespeare might say.  New economic ideas, new ecological initiatives and new diplomatic peace initiatives all take a leap of faith.  It always seems risky to move in a new direction.  And it is risky but better risk swimming for shore than cling to a sinking lifeboat.  Is it a surprise to anyone that those who benefit most from the status quo should want to disparage alternatives.  By painting the protesters as the lunatic fringe, the current elites can assure the support of the timid which is most Canadians who face the challenges of day to day living.  As Otto von Bismarck said  so eloquently ‘A man who relies upon the state for his pension is not likely to rebel against that state.’ By the time most Canadians realize that their comfort is no longer exists it will be too late.  In this way the political and economic elites of this country smear their opponents and solidify their support.  It is a bold stroke.

So there you have it.  The motives for the government to commit insanity.  I suspect that many remain unconvinced.  They will say that this is too Machiavellian.  After all these are good people, good Canadians.  We just don’t do these kind of things or have these kinds of motivations.  To those I say this.  To deny that the above is plausible is to deny:

• that there were no Residential Schools;
• that there have been concentration camps in Canada (1914-18, 1930-36, 1940-46);
• that Canadian POW camps at the end of World War Two allowed Nazi officers to hold courts martial and execute German prisoners under our protection with guns and bullets supplied by the camp administration;
• that over a million Canadians were spied on and blacklisted by the RCMP during the Cold War.  The information gathered shared with the United States.  Many had their lives and / or careers destroyed.   Several committed suicide or died prematurely from stress.  Their crimes included subscription to the wrong journals, activity in their trade union, support for the United Nations, support for peace, etc.;
• that there was no Maher Arar;
• there is no Omar Khadr.

The list could go on but I think you get the picture.  So before you judge me mad you must first explain why our government should be trusted given the track record.

So what is an illegal alien?  I suppose Martians who fail to check in at Area 51 in neighbouring Nevada would qualify.  And I hope all those evangelicals have gotten the papers in order for that second coming they keep going on about.  How they are going to do a background check with the Roman administration for that guy I have no idea.  Tiberius was known for keeping track of his pornography not citizenship records.  Of course I am just being silly.  They mean citizens of other states who are in the United States without having jumped through the appropriate bureaucratic hoops so that the unemployable relatives of senators and congressmen can keep getting a paycheck.  Police across the state will be on the lookout for those nefariously beautiful tall Nordic types and stake out any bar and they are sure to find an Irishman, Scotsman and Englishman not to mention the proverbial priest, rabbi and minister.  Germans can be found in the back of bakeries reading Clausewitz and the French are strolling the streets insulting everyone they meet.  No racial profiling here.

What would you like to bet that the only people questioned by police under this law are olive skinned or black haired or have a Hispanic last name?  Of course Italians and other Mediterraneans will get confused in the mix.  One sheriff in Arizona claims he can tell an illegal from a legal by the shoes.  Methinks this has more to do with his foot fetish than with good policing.  How can you tell an illegal immigrant in a nation of immigrants.  You can’t.  And while there may well be undocumented Swedes in Arizona, they are not going to be the ones questioned about legal residency.  This new law shows the depths to which, not just American, but Western societies collectively have descended.  Can a yellow sombrero patch sewn onto their clothing be far behind?

Which one do think police will question?

While some police in Arizona have registered objection to the new law, the official line is trust us we will not abuse this power.  Police in the state promise to apply this law with the same professionalism that they apply all the rest.  I am sure that is what worries Latino Arizonans.  Opponents of the law are characterized as outsiders who don’t understand the state.  Probably the same outside influences that thought Blacks in the South should have rights.  How can we trust an organization to make a ‘reasonable’ judgment in an irrational situation.  We might as well say we are giving police x-ray vision or secret decoder rings to determine who to question and who not to.

The governor raises the violence of drug smuggling against the backdrop of a recent murder of a rancher by drug smugglers to justify this law.  Fear is the best way to make the public accept what they know is wrong.  Most undocumented workers in Arizona are not drug smugglers and most of the key players in the smuggling operations live in Mexico.  Drug smugglers are easy to identify.  They are the ones with 50 kilos of powder in their wheel well and an Uzi on their lap.  Undocumented immigrants who do engage in the smuggling racket are the ones with bloated bellies and super strength ex-lax in their pocket.  They are generally being forced through threats to assist the smugglers.  The vast majority of undocumented immigrants break no other laws than the ones that say they cannot live and work where they live and work.  They know that any arrest will end in deportation.  They can’t complain no matter how egregiously they are treated.  They spend their lives more sinned against than sinning.  But it is not the undocumented worker but the documented immigrant who must endure the degradation of constantly proving his right to be.  This law tells him that he is only an American on paper.  He must constantly prove his identity while his northern European neighbour does not.  All because most Latin Americans are mestizo, mixed blood.  So because his ancestors were less racist than our ancestors and chose not to exterminate the indigenous population as we did he must now suffer our bigotry.  Does no one else see the irony in this?

Probably the most interesting and ignored aspect of this story is the people who are most supportive of this law to assert the most basic right of any state as they call it, the right to assert sovereign borders, are the same people who don’t believe that applies to any other country besides the United States.  It is not the most basic right of any state but of the United States exclusively.  America as a nation and Americans as individuals seem to think that if they violate the borders of other countries it should be just accepted.  Ask Iran or North Korea.  But let hard working families cross the border and perform tasks that we would not take for wages we would not suffer, contribute to the local economy everyday by paying rent on lodgings that most often fail to achieve even the lowest standards conceivable and patronize local merchants and we will bring down our fury to wipe them from our sight.  After all America good; foreigners bad.  That is why the Republicans, the largest group in support of the law, hate the United Nations.  It is too full of foreigners.

Let’s end this nonsense before somebody gets hurt.  At what price salvation?  Security isn’t worth it if the cost is surrendering our humanity and our honour.  And this isn’t security it is security theater.  It provides only the illusion of security at the expense of human dignity.  To paraphrase Phil Ochs, “Arizona, find another country to belong to.”

What the public needs to see is the evidence that could only be attained through the use of the enhanced police powers contained in the anti-terrorism laws and how that evidence directly prevented catastrophic loss of life.  Anything else is diversion.  Everything thus far released could have been achieved using standard police procedures.  Why then do we need the added tools of the anti-terrorism law.  That is what must be justified if those laws are to be extended. 

The weakness of the government’s arguments for maintaining the anti-terrorism laws is demonstrated by the mock explosion.  The only reason to include that footage is to terrorize the public.  Terrorism in service of preventing terrorism, there is a metaphor for the new millennium.  Scared and confused the electorate is prepared to accept whatever the government claims will safeguard them, whether it really will or not.  I am surprised that this footage was allowed in court as it is clearly irrelevant.  Whether you are planting a bomb capable only of cracking a ceramic pot or a nuclear device capable of taking out an entire city, you are still committing a crime.  What possible value could a demonstration of the blast from a particular size of explosive be in a trial to determine if these men were guilty of plotting a terrorist attack?  Would they have been less guilty if the explosion planned had been for instance half the size demonstrated.  Or is this the purpose of out anti-terrorism laws?  Are they needed so that the crown may enter irrelevant and inflammatory evidence in order to convict by hatred and anger rather than law.  If so, then it is a frivolous and dangerous justification. 

Eight years after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington it is time to return to sanity and allow these over-reactions to pass into history.  In the wake of those events a terrified population lost track of what this country and western democracies are supposed to stand for.  Yes it is a dangerous world out there and yes we should be vigilant against those who would threaten our lives.  But in being vigilant let us not become vigilantes.  Let us remember that while law and individual rights and freedoms can leave us vulnerable to dangers, the dangers of a police state without rights are far greater.  In retrospect the chaos of Weimar was preferable to the order of the Third Reich.

Business, government and social organizations rushed to find ‘suitable’ representatives of discriminated minorities (of course in the case of women it has always been a discriminated majority in North American society) to diversify their public image while avoiding any substantive reform.  Society could feel comfortable in pointing to these public images as proof that things were getting better while nothing changed.  The purpose of the token is to deflect scrutiny.  For those individuals being used it was always a moral dilemma.  For them the scam was all too apparent.  Their positions often lacked the substantial authority of their peers and were often artificial creations with little or no meaningful responsibility attached.  But their rise to even those two dimensional positions were a wedge for what dreams may come.  In the ghetto, the barrio and the kitchen their image might and did provide inspiration to countless members of their community.  To youth it signaled hope.  So even in its insipid attempt at retarding change, the token could still fulfill its higher function.  A token is good when it represents substance; it is bad when it substitutes for substance. 

Unfortunately, we see tokens substituting for substance everywhere today.  The token haute architecture and flashing electric gizmos in schools substitute for education.  Twitter and other social media substitute for real friendship for far too many people.  Corporate music, advertising, television etc. substitute for art.  Charisma and glibness substitute for political leadership.  People like Bono use activism to advance their career while enriching themselves on the suffering of the many (FYI:  U2 launders its money through a tax haven which means that the people of Ireland are poorer and Ireland has less wealth to share internationally via aid.  If you talk the talk but don’t walk the walk it is self-serving tokenism.)  President Obama rejects a single payer health care system in favour of fixing Medicare and Medicaid, the fatally flawed one-two punch of American health care.  The token allows Obama to rise to the podium and proclaim himself the messiah of health care without the political consequences of standing for what is right, the health of the American people. 

Recently my local Zehr’s store started charging 5 cents for each plastic bag used to pack a customer’s groceries.  The option was to purchase a reusable cloth bag.  My wife and I have several of these and it is a good idea.  Most tokens are good ideas.  Plastic bags don’t bio-degrade.  They are a hazard to wildlife. particularly waterfowl.  They are a landfill nightmare and should never have been introduced.  It may come as a shock to my younger readers but they did not replace paper bags until well after my marriage.  I might say here that paper would still be an environmentally friendly alternative with the use recycled paper and paper from renewable sources such as hemp.  My problem is not the charge for plastic or the idea to encourage customers to act more responsibly.  Actually I think there should be an outright ban on the use and manufacture of plastic bags.  In a way the policy the store and many others like it are pursuing is actually a token of a token.  If the store, as it should, believes that plastic bags are the scourge that they are then don’t offer the option.  Giving people the choice is just passing the ball onto the consumer instead of being assertive on saving the environment.  

But the bag replacement incentive now seizing the industry is just a marketing token.  It is a token because it does not address the serious environmental problem of our modern supermarket.  I was surprised about a year or so ago to discover that a grocery store has an exponentially larger carbon footprint than a manufacturing facility of the same size.  Looking around my Zehr’s market after my epiphany I felt incredibly stupid.  It had been staring me in the face for years and I had not seen it.  Open freezers caked on the edge with frost, ceilings 25 or 30 feet high, inefficient lighting strategies, it was all there.  My Zehr’s store is less than ten years old.  It was built after global warming had become a major political and social issue.  Environmentalism in general had become a focus of social interest and concern from species diversity to chlorofluorocarbons.  The options were there for Zehr’s and other grocery stores built at the time to act responsibly to incorporate the latest in environmental engineering.  I might not have been aware supermarkets were putrid cesspools of excessive carbon spewage but the scientists were and so corporations like Zehr’s should have.  Even so, they built another environmental catastrophe anyway.  Why?  Because they didn’t care about the environment then and they don’t now.  This current little token is a marketing ploy.  There is an industry-wide competition to out-green your competitor.  The public smiles, self-satisfied in the illusion that they are doing something for the environment while the corporations laugh and rake in the profits and the Earth weeps.

Some say ‘Well they are doing something.’  Music to the ears of the corporation who pray each day that the consumer will stand up and demand they do what is right not what is profitable.  By why would we.  We have our little token, the amorphous ‘something’ is being done.  And when our grandchildren ask why they must wear an air filtration mask to go out and why the weather patterns are so violent and erratic, we can smile self-assuredly and say ‘we did what we could we supported the tokens in the Age of Tokenism.’

There are many forms of psychological abuse against our children, some idiosyncratic and some social.  The young girl driven to suicide by a thoughtless adult who first raised her hope for love through creating a fictitious suitor on a social networking site and then cruelly dashed that hope in a warped attempt to assist her own daughter to bully the victim is an example of just how serious psychological abuse can be.  Social abuse differs only in method not impact.  We rail at the image of children brainwashed to strap explosives on their tiny bodies, becoming human weapons for the political, religious, social or just plain perverse agendas of groups like the Taliban or the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Such psychological abuse of innocents undermines any possible validity their philosophies could warrant.  No justification exists for inculcating hate in the minds of young people.  Brainwashing anyone to make them believe what some other wishes is always wrong.  In the case of youth it is also always criminal. 

I doubt there is a single reader that has disagreed with me so far.  I want to go a step further though.  What about brainwashing by omission.  If we agree with the above arguments should it not be a natural step to say that intentionally withholding knowledge from children for the purpose of manipulating them into believing what some other desires them to believe or to think is also wrong and criminal.  That is a natural corollary of my arguments above.  Al Qaeda does not say to a young suicide bomber, ‘read this treatise by Osama bin Laden and this pamphlet by Thomas Paine and then go kill the infidel because bin Laden is right and Paine is wrong.‘  My suspicion is that Al Qaeda training facilities do not have well stocked and balanced libraries.  The abuse is not in presenting the children with a biased idea, all ideas are by nature biased, it is in presenting the idea as the only idea.  Omitting information from children in order to inculcate any social agenda is abuse.  And therefore anyone who would perpetrate such abuse should be sanctioned by our society accordingly.  Presenting children with all perspectives but saying that we as Canadians, or in this community or this family believe that one or the other perspective is the correct one is different.  That is not necessarily abuse.  A child’s country, community and most particularly family will likely be more persuasive than an obscure author.  The child may therefore be guided by such authoritative opinion but they still are aware that other perspectives do exist.  It might cross the line into abuse if we were to present the other perspectives with derision or ridicule.  This is not an exact science and a judgement call must be made at what point abuse occurs.  But the case I have in mind at the moment clearly crosses that line. 

Currently there is a bill before the Alberta Legislature that would allow parents to withdraw their children from class if the curriculum includes anything which goes against their religious beliefs.  The premier is even trying to defend this abomination by saying that it is only religious questions.  Translation:  Religious brainwashing good; any other brainwashing bad.  I’d bet you hot cross buns to pancakes (the Anglicans should get that one) if I were to demand the right to remove my child from class to avoid having them exposed to capitalist ideals,  the same god-bothering twits behind this bill (wonder what’s in their libraries?) would be pushing to remove her from my home to save her from this twisted old socialist.  Every evangelical from Lethbridge to Fort Macleod would be burning my effigy in their state of the art tele-pulpit.  So why the muted response to this legislation.  A polite whimper from the CBC (okay what do we expect, they’re Canadian) is all the coverage I have seen so far.  Of course the CBC missed a number of child abuse / religion stories until it was too late just ask Catholic choir boys and our Aboriginal people.  Capitalism encourages behaviours and causes practices that I am convinced harm innocent human beings and are anathema to the basic cooperative nature of humanity.  In simple terms capitalism to me is a crime against humanity which should be prosecuted as we prosecuted Naziism at Nuremburg.  So I would be remiss in my responsibilities as a parent to allow some pro-capitalist school system to expose my child to such obscenity.  Right?  If I firmly believe this, and I do, I should shelter my child from it.  Wrong.  I would be abusing my child.  Ignorance weakens a human being and my job as a parent is to strengthen my child to survive in a world of conflict and contradiction.  To disarm that child from the start is the ultimate abuse. 

For those who want to argue that the two things are not the same tell me why.  If you can’t defend your argument, you don’t have one.  Premier Ed Stelmach, if you pass this bill you are a child abuser.  You are a pariah in our society and should be sanctioned accordingly.  To the RCMP (let’s pretend they might listen to reason and are not just the goon squad for sordid politicians), if child abuse is an abhorrent crime within our society you must focus all of your resources into bringing Mr. Stelmach and every member of the legislature in support of this bill before the bar of justice and seek out those who use the money of god to manipulate and control society.  Save our children now and we won’t need a parade of religious leaders apologizing later.

The sweet sound of the familiar wafts out of the new Obama administration.  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, in her recent trip to China states that human rights must not get in the way of dealing with the economic crisis.  Although President Obama will be closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he has decided to continue to support the policy of extraordinary rendition which is the practice of having others do your torture for you.  I have more respect for the torturer than the sanctimonious hypocrite. 

But I guess change and a new approach don’t last as long as they used to.  A nation wept with joy and expectation as the first Black man was inaugurated as president of the United States, a country with a horrific history of civil and human  rights abuses.  The hope and the promise was that this would be a new dawning of the American dream; that all humans would be treated equally and with respect and dignity.  How could it be otherwise?  How could a Black man in the United States turn his back on civil and human rights?  How could he compare himself to Abraham Lincoln and use slavery as a backdrop for the significance of his presidency while blindly ignoring slavery in those countries he interacts with?  It seems absurd but few are questioning him on it.  Those who try are pushed to the side by the ‘mainstream Left’ who are gushing like schoolgirls in the glow of the new messiah. 

The masses that enjoy the opulence and relative ease of our society have no stomach for a debate on human rights.  I guess the condition is that rights are good as long as they don’t affect our lifestyle.  For years the United States and its industrialized friends have chided China for its human rights record at Hollywood fundraising events or at galas with other progressive groups while conducting business as usual in the corridors of power.  It is a metaphor for our time.  The ultimate Potemkin Village.  While we swim in the filth of reality we see only the crystal waters of our self-induced mirage.  So who can we really blame, the politicians that encourage our delusion or ourselves for knowingly embracing it?  What is the fear?  Could it be that we know that our society is as cold and uncaring towards us, its own members, as it is toward those who suffer the indignity every day of not being considered fully human? 

I wonder.