June 9, 2006 at 11:23 PM | Permalink on The Gods of the Copybook Headlines
Yesterday in Caledonia:
The CH TV camera operators, one of whom needed stitches to close a head wound, said Ontario Provincial Police did nothing despite their pleas for help.
"The police were right behind me and I asked for protection," said Ken MacKay, a CH TV camera operator.
"I said, `I'm being assaulted, I need protection, they're trying to steal my camera' and nothing happened.
For nearly two months a small group of aboriginals has seized private and public property, flouted the laws of Ontario and Canada, disrupted the day to day activities of law abiding citizens and as a group generally behaved as a law unto themselves. The provincial government has through out the crisis repeatedly cast itself as an honest broker; even going so far as recalling a former premier from retirement to act as negotiator. Yet the conduct of the provincial police, under instructions from Queen's Park, has been far from that of an honest broker. In virtually every confrontation between local residents and the aboriginal occupiers the OPP have sided with the aboriginals.
When local residents attempted to set up a counter blockade it was quickly removed by the OPP, while an opposing aboriginal blockade was left intact until removed by the occupiers themselves, entirely of their own volition. When some of the occupying aboriginals tore down a powerline it was greeted with feeble complaints from the authorities. When local residents, enraged at having their livelihoods and personal welfare threatened by the actions of these so called "protesters," an Orwellian abuse of the language, it was the local residents, not the aboriginals who were denounced, or at the very least placed on the same moral plan as their attackers.
The situation is "tense" and "dangerous" and a need for calm and cooler heads to prevail is paramount, say our political leaders. Both sides, the government insists, have grievances and they will be worked out in due course. Yet no equality of terms is possible. There is no middle ground or need for cooler heads to prevail. To treat the occupiers as anything else than what they are is inherently unequal. The pretense of treating both sides as having equally valid points is ultimately self defeating, as witnessed by the attack on the cameraman quoted at the beginning of this post.
When two sides with legitimate grievances or interests enter into a negotiation they do more than forsake violence, they concede the legitimacy of their opponents viewpoints. Not completely, of course, otherwise there would be no need for negotiation. What they concede is that their opponent, hopefully soon to be partner, is legitimate and that in part their interests are legitimate as well. Both sides must concede this or there is no negotiation.
The aboriginals in Caledonia are not engaged in a protest. Protests do not last two months and do not involve the seizure of large swaths of land. If anything the events in Caledonia are closer to an insurrection, or the actions of an attempted succession, than a protest. The aboriginal occupiers have never conceded the legitimacy of their opponents, the local residents and the civil authorities. The removal of the road blockade was described as "good will gesture." In other words the local residents had no right, legal or moral, to their property, no right to travel on public highways, no right to a continuous flow of electricity, all these things are only allowed by the permission of the occupiers.
The Caledonian Aboriginals have established, to borrow Trudeau's words from the October Crisis, a "parallel power" in southern Ontario. There is, however, nothing of the widespread danger posed by the FLQ. The occupiers represent a small minority which in turn is a small minority of the Canadian population. Yet in substance they have gone much further than the FLQ ever did. An attempt to section off a part of, say, the Eastern Townships and seizure the property of anglophone business, would have been responded to by the Quebec and federal governments with a force and speed far more dramatic than that displayed in October of 1970.
More worrisome than the occupiers themselves, and the separatist ideology that sustains them, is the surrender of civil authority by the provincial government, and its tacit acceptance by the federal government. The unspoken word paralyzing both of the senior levels of government; the intellectual force than allows for the blatant hypocrisy of treating victims and attackers as moral equals, is racism. The fear of violence, in particular of a situation similar to the one that lead to the death of Dudley George a decade ago at Ipperwash, is certainly strong. This cannot alone explain the conduct of the government.
Change the protagonists, replace the aboriginals with white supremacists or Islamist terrorists, and the rationalizations collapse. There would be no fear of violence when dealing with groups considered evil. But the aboriginals are victims of racism. The logic of modernity is that no sin cannot be erased, or at the very least excused, by victimhood. It is absolution of a scope and thoroughness that no Catholic priest could ever deliver or sanction; absolution of everything, even original sin. The base motives of the white man cannot be extrapolated into the soul of the red. Savages they are not, noble they remain.
A comparison with the repeated attempts of the Americans, and the European powers, to negotiate with the Iranian mullahs and the events in Caledonia may seem far fetched, yet the same principle remains in both. In both cases the explicit excuse for accepting the lies and violence of Iranians and the Caledonian occupiers is the fear of violence. In both cases it is really a fear of racism and what is now considered a by product of racism, imperialism. Contrast the indifference of much of the European elite to the NATO military actions in Bosnia to their outright hostility of the invasion of Iraq and possible war with Iran. The danger posed by either Iraq or Iran is far greater than was ever posed by Serbia. More broadly the danger posed by European ethnic nationalism is far less than that posed by Islamism. The difference is that whites attacking whites will not draw charges of colonialism.
Modern governments through out the western world are following the injunctions of the New Testament in a way, ironically, most modern Christians would not support, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." The West, being the most sinful, must tread cautiously when dealing with its enemies. Until we re-acquire pride in the Western tradition, whatever our ethnic or racial background, we will never shake the paralysis that afflicts our actions in the Middle East and Caledonia. In the end, it's about the Will to Win.