Book Review

by John von Heyking

Shakedown: How Our Government is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, by Ezra Levant. 216 pp. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 2009). Can. $14.50.

Last December, a group of scholars belonging to the American Political Science Association signed a petition calling for the APSA, which will have its annual meeting in Toronto next September, to take measures ensuring the academic freedom and free speech of its members be protected while the organization meets in Canada. The petition was drafted in response to recent hearings by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) (and provincial counterparts) targeting critics of same-sex marriage and militant Islam. Many readers of this website are interested whether scholars taking critical positions vis-à-vis these topics can be sure they will be safe to speak at the conference.

One of the targets of the HRCs, Ezra Levant, a Calgary lawyer, conservative activist, blogger, and journalist, has written the book currently under review, which is part report of his own misfortunes, part analysis, and part call-to-arms to dismantle the HRCs. He provides a glimpse at a form of legal, moral, and intellectual corruption within the Canadian legal system that one might compare to a cancer, as Solzhenitsyn referred to similar phenomena in the former Soviet Union, because it eats away at the basic foundations of the society's legal and political order. HRCs operate in a regime of lawlessness that eats away at the foundations of Canada's regime of laws. While Levant focuses on a Canadian problem, the problem in fact runs deeper than that particular regime, and into the ideology of human rights and the peculiar corruption it manifests in liberal democracies.

HRCs were invented in the 1960s as a kind of arbitration court enabling victims of racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination to defend themselves against being arbitrarily fired or evicted. Such victims were usually low income and could count on the government picking up the tab.

Whatever the benefits and drawbacks of their original plan, HRCs have now been transformed into tribunals seeking control over people's thoughts and sentiments. Whereas HRCs were originally meant to correct particular wrongs, today's HRCs aspire to root every wrong opinion and sentiment out of everyone's minds and hearts. They have become agents of what Gerhart Niemeyer, in his Between Nothingness and Paradise, refers to as total critique. Their work will not be done until Canadian society is remade into their own image.

One can see this ideological expansion in the legislation establishing HRCs. According to Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, which defines hate speech as a statement "that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt." The legislation deals with hypotheticals, not in realities. As Levant notes, the statement need not actually incite hatred, but need only "likely" expose identifiable victims wherein the likelihood will be determined by expert testimony, such as a communications professor in the case of the proceedings against Mark Steyn. Nor is actual intent necessary. It has been pointed out that the legislation is so loosely worded, that a gay activist organization publicizing high rates of substance abuse and health problems in the gay community for the purpose of gaining sympathy, might actually be accused of having "expose[d] a person or persons to hatred or contempt." Because the law deals with hypotheticals instead of real crimes, Levant argues that HRCs in fact imitate science fiction notions of "pre-crime;" that is, HRCs have in their mandate to prosecute future "criminals" (76). Levant helpfully illuminates the absurdities of HRCs.

Levant points out that the poorly crafted legislation enables HRCs to prosecute its targets in ways that no real court would permit. HRCs may obtain information and may even enter one's home without a search warrant, nor do the normal rules of courtroom procedure apply. In a funny but disturbing passage, Levant describes how the HRC that targeted him; it called his interrogation an "interview," even though he was compelled under law to present himself to a government office. The "interviewer," who even shook his hand when she introduced herself, expressed her disagreement with Levant's political opinions while stating that "everyone has a right to his own opinion," which is clearly false under the HRC law.

Clichés obfuscate the reality that the HRCs operate with decadent understandings of liberty. Levant concludes the book with the suggestion that dismantling HRCs can begin with "denormalizing" them, which includes taking away the aura that they are spokesmen for freedom and "human rights." Instead of calling them "human rights," call them censors; instead of calling them "defendants," call them "targets," and so on. Levant's grounding in Anglo-American understandings of civil liberty, as well as his common sense, enables him to produce a compelling critique of HRCs. Without naming it, Levant identifies the "second reality" (to borrow a term Eric Voegelin liked to use to describe the lie in which ideologues knowingly live) of HRCs. If one wishes to see the absurdities of this second reality, one need only read one of the "live blogs" of the Mark Steyn trial or watch the video of Levant's own trial on YouTube. All participants get drawn into the Dummheit of the process.

Questions linger after reading this book. What is the ideology that motivates HRC functionaries? How does it persist in what many scholars take to be a post-ideological age (in the sense that thinkers including Eric Voegelin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and others have thoroughly demolished the notion that ideology has anything to do with truth)?

The two questions are intertwined. HRCs strive to create a society they see as free of discrimination and intolerance, which they see as based on retrograde views concerning dignity and society. This is very much the goal of the "autonomous man" that ideologues from the French radicals to Marx have sought. Christians are among their favorite targets, because Christianity is seen as the intellectual and moral backbone of the tradition they seek to overthrow. This view also explains why they never target racial minorities for hate speech (e.g., Sunni Muslim hate speech toward Shiite Muslims). Our common enemy makes me your friend.

Have we not been through all this? Is not the age of ideology over? Even if Voegelin and Solzhenitsyn have failed to convince people, have not the post-modernists made people too cynical to believe in any ideals? Not so fast, for two reasons.

First, Levant notes that the very name, "Human Rights Commission," sounds noble. Who could oppose human rights? In a sense, HRCs are egalitarianism run amok. For an analysis of this phenomenon, read Alexis de Tocqueville's account of democratic despotism in Volume Two, Part Four of Democracy in America. HRCs corrode the rule of law, because their goal is the ever-receding goal of perfect equality that democracies hold out but can never reach. Law deals with liberty in the present, while HRCs pursue an equality of the future.

Second, Levant indicates that as much as HRCs are motivated by their ideals, they are also motivated by bureaucratic careerism and by ressentiment.

Commissioners tend to be political appointees with no background in either civil liberties law or philosophy. Many are failed politicians or divorce lawyers. For example, the commissioner originally appointed to investigate Levant is a city of Calgary alderman who resigned when she realized she would face an uncomfortable level of publicity that would also have revealed the mendacity of the HRCs. She simply realized she was in over her head. Even so, HRCs are motivated not only to find what they consider to be hatred, but they have also been caught stirring it up. HRC employees were discovered to have gone "undercover" by posing as white supremacists on chat-sites to stir up "hate." This would be entrapment in a normal court of law. HRCs do this, because they need to demonstrate the need for HRCs to exist. They wish to eliminate discrimination, but they need discrimination to exist so they can receive a pay check. It is a noble calling.

The careerist HRC bureaucrat finds his counterpart in the claimant who is usually motivated by ressentiment. One "victim," a transsexual woman (formerly a male), received a cash reward from a Vancouver rape-counseling center that refused to hire her as a counselor.[PDF Download] The "victim" wished to use her job as a counselor of rape victims to secure her status as a woman. Another "victim" was awarded a large financial settlement from a Christian pastor who published a letter critical of homosexual activists. The only thing the "victim" suffered was the bother of his own effort to fill out the paperwork targeting the pastor. No acts of hatred were directed as a result of the letter either against him (who is not even homosexual, merely a self-appointed spokesman for them) or against homosexuals. In addition to having to pay the fine, the divorce lawyer working as the commissioner placed a lifetime ban on the pastor from ever again saying anything critical of homosexuals or homosexual activists. Levant's description of some of the cases and the rewards to the "victims" would be hilarious if not for the fact that he describes a phenomenon that takes place outside the boundaries of the law.

Thus, HRCs are in a sense post-ideological. Voegelin and others exposed ideology as a fraud. However, instead of taking up their challenge and reestablishing political society rooted in truth, we have enabled the fraudsters to play their game under our own noses. The title of Levant's book, Shakedown, is appropriate. Under the guise of "human rights," Canadians have permitted a regime of lawlessness and thuggery to operate parallel to their regime of law. Levant offers sensible criticism and sensible suggestions for reform.

John von Heyking is a prolific author of books and papers in political science and is a contributor to VoegelinView. A biographical notice is found here. Our own detailed review of the law under discussion may be found here.