Their Silence Is A Warning

Governments across the west are curiously silent about what is happening in Canada.

The Eye of Silence, Max Ernst (1944)

A shorter version of the following piece appeared in the American Thinker.

Fires In Liberal Democracies
The fallacious position put forth by hate speech police who feel it their duty to call out “hate speech” wherever they’re offended by any speech and frame it as such, is to advocate the limits of free speech using the famously debunked “you cannot yell fire in a crowded theatre” argument.

There are several worthy challenges to this argument which show it to be a fallacy in challenging first amendment rights and a poor if not shameful ruling by Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes. Perhaps no better refutation exists than Christopher Hitchens’ 2006 speech at a conference in Toronto of all places. The entire speech should be mandatory viewing, and homework assigned by civics teachers across the west. He opens his address from an old neo-gothic oak paneled Harry Potter looking University debate hall:

“Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Now you’ve heard it. Not screamed in a crowded theatre admittingly, as I now realize I might have shouted it in the Hogwarts’ dining room.”

Let’s take this argument, and assume a much more serious hypothetical situation than the crowded theatre analogy. What if there was a fire in a liberal democracy scorching human rights and civil liberties? What if that fire was in several liberal democracies and spreading fast? The people are loudly screaming “Fire!” but leaders and human rights organizations across the west are curiously silent.

The implementation of emergency war powers in Canada to suspend rights, is either a temporary overreach of power or a blatant authoritarian shape shift to crush political dissent, seize assets, and implement martial law on completely fabricated charges. The majority of people in the U.S. and Canada are seeing the totalitarian shape shift, and loudly screaming “Fire!” but there are no western leaders rushing with an extinguisher, nor even any acknowledgement of what is happening.