Published in the Western Standard, November 8, 2004, p. 34. (Also available in a pdf scan.)
Engineering Obedience
by
Pierre Lemieux
It has been a beautiful autumn. The other day, as I had finished (earlier than planned) writing a speech I am giving in Rome next month, I decided to go and adjust the sight of my 30-06, in preparation for the deer-hunting season. Or in case somebody comes attacking me a hundred yards away. Shhh! Don’t repeat this to anybody: if the praetorians chose to notice that I own guns for protection, they could revoke my firearms licence and confiscate my guns, as their C-68 “law” (so-called) allows them to.
So I hit the trail to my forest, with my knapsack on my back and my 30-06 on my shoulder. The trees were burning yellow and red under the deep blue sky, and the forest smelled like the autumns of my childhood. I confess that this rifle is registered, as are all new rifles bought after the infamous C-68 "law" came into force. Worse, I am ashamed to say that I still have a Possession and Acquisition Licence, which expires next year. But I deliberately did not bring with me either this crappy licence or the registration certificate of this specific rifle, as required by their law. My ancestors, the French-Canadian coureurs des bois, have travelled these forests without any permission or interior passport for centuries.
As a matter of fact, I did not bring any ID papers at all. Can you imagine this? Armed in the forest with no ID papers! No crappy licence, no gun registration certificate, no pleasure craft operator card, no driver’s licence, no social insurance card, no citizenship card, no medicare card, no hunting licence, no nothing!
In his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), the author recalled his fears when planning his escape to the North: “Any one having a white face, and being so disposed, could stop us, and subject us to examination. . . . When I get there [in Pennsylvania], I shall not be required to have a pass; I can travel without being disturbed.” Now, instead of “having a white face,” read “having a praetorian’s badge.”
My little daily acts of defiance are, of course, only small beer compared to the slave revolt waged by the real heroes of the Canadian Unregistered Firearm Owners Association (www.cufoa.ca). But I have not said my last word.
Cultures can be defined as shared preferences and lifestyles. I know something about cultures, as I switch among many. I am (nearly) as comfortable drinking beer with hunters and gun nuts as I am at ease in a New York City salon or talking about arts and life and The Story of O with topless women on the French Riviera. Canada has never been known for its intellectual salons or its sensuous life, but it used to be a free country. In a free country individuals can, within the limits set by other individuals’ free choices, adhere to the cultures they choose.
Circulating without ID papers and owning guns without permission have been part of the Canadian tradition for centuries, but are now relegated to a criminalized minority culture. With their laws and their cops, the low-life statocrats in Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec City are destroying our culture.
Why does the state want to destroy our culture? Because we are a minority? This is not a satisfactory answer, as the state actively protects and subsidizes other minorities: the “visible minorities,” the feminists, the aboriginals, the Francophones (whatever that means), the national intellectual class, the homosexuals (whose activists try, like ours, to make-believe they are more than a one per cent minority).
Why, then, does the state favour some minority cultures and oppress others? The answer lies in the nature of the state, whose natural tendency (if left unchecked) is to help the clienteles and cultures that support its power, including fake dissidents who can be bribed into the court, and to crush those minorities who represent a real challenge to its unlimited domination. Other things being equal, the state will attack the minorities that it can oppress at the lowest political cost. In Canada and elsewhere, the culture that the state is trying to social-engineer is a culture of obedience.