Oh, here's a big surprise. The headline "Radicals break off talks with police" in Wednesday's Citizen announces the failure of attempts by Ottawa police to "keep lines of communication open in the lead-up to next week's protests." I could have told them that whenever you enter talks with such people you need an umbrella, not so much to deal with their agitated speaking style as because, like Neville Chamberlain, you'll make concession after concession and get attacked anyway.
Pierre Trudeau had their measure exactly, having met plenty in his youth: "They cry persecution to justify going underground as fugitives from reality." They shout from a street corner that we live in a police state where dissent is brutally suppressed, and government agents swoop down and invite them onto state-run media talk shows. Oh, the humanity.
Some even had the gall to ask residents of Ottawa to "adopt an activist" by taking one of these charming creatures into your own house where, if you're very lucky, they won't start by denouncing bourgeois prejudices like cleanliness, proceed to empty your fridge while complaining about the quality and, if there's meat, the morality of your food and end by liberating your domestic non-human companion. There's an old saying that "you can't save the world, if you can't pay the rent." But to radicals, not paying your rent is the first step in saving the world. Rent is a bourgeois prejudice. Property is a bourgeois prejudice. Everything is a bourgeois prejudice. Smash reality.
Start with the reality that there's plenty of free speech in Canada. You can rent a hall anywhere in the country and hold a meeting. You can march through the streets. You can send letters to the editor, hand out leaflets or start your own newspaper. The one thing you aren't allowed to do is shout down your opponents. Insisting on holding your noisy, disorderly rally right in the middle of whatever you don't like isn't an attempt to prevail in the marketplace of ideas but to smash its windows.
Move on to the deeper reality that they just aren't very persuasive. True, my views don't appear to be prevailing either. But if you won't read my column, I don't wrap it 'round a brick and heave it through your window. I accept that I can't take possession of your mind through force of will, and try to write better instead. Not them.
The deepest reality is that radicals are engaged in a dark psychological drama that turns on forcing you to accept their views not despite but because of their irrationality. Unreasonableness is not an unfortunate side effect of their political passion. It is their political passion. They actually boast that the personal is the political. And it is. But it's not a pretty sight.
Nor is it original. In the 1950s, Herbert Marcuse declared that bourgeois, everyone-gets-to-talk free speech was "Repressive Tolerance" because the radical left didn't win. He wanted "liberating tolerance" which "would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left." But when people claim the right to kick in the teeth of those with whom they disagree, you don't meet them halfway, agreeing that they can have the incisors but not the bicuspids.
What about all the reasonable protesters whose legitimate concerns are overshadowed by the antics of a few? Bosh. This is no tempest in a latte cup. The threat of violence is a major inconvenience and a major cost at every international gathering because far too many "reasonable" leftists refuse to disassociate themselves from the "diversity of tactics" (nudge nudge wink wink smash smash). People close enough to assure us no reputable people were involved, but not close enough to help police identify the perpetrators, are complicit in a Good Protester, Bad Protester squeeze: Let Maude Barlow write your trade policy or something might happen to your nice downtown.
As the Ottawa police have now discovered, joining a historical parade of well-meaning people, it is not incidental but central to the radical agenda to make you share their lies, to turn their private discontents into a national tragedy. They put forward some utterly unreasonable proposition for the basic purpose of making you accept their right to be unreasonable, to establish their overwhelming psychological dominance over you. That's why appeasement doesn't soften their rage but sharpens it, and why when you finally refuse to give in, they turn violent with glee, not regret.
"Society," to use a favourite radical swear word, says you are allowed to speak out and even to protest, but not to break the law. It's psychotic for "activists" to say we're kidding about the first part. It's time the police showed them we aren't kidding about the second part either.
John Robson is Senior Editorial Writer and Columnist.
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