The
alleged terrorists recently arrested in the Toronto area were
described by the press as “nice guys,” “normal,” “outgoing.” One
of the alleged leaders is “a soft person,” “a
quiet suburbanite.” They “came to Canada as children,” but “were
pretty much raised here,” “very religious.” A “quiet
family . . . watered their lawn,” “never drink,” “never
smoke,” “a very decent and good kid.” One “played
basketball.” In other words, it could be you.
I
fear that the journalists’ chorus about the suspects
being like you and me is related to a deeper phenomenon.
It reminded me
of the sales rep I recently met chatting with villagers in a
convenience store here, in Lac-Saguay, Que. Explaining his
support for gun
control laws, the salesman invoked some recent mad killing
and, with his
disarming commercial smile, said of the madman something like: “It
could be anybody, it could be me.”
Intellectual
sales reps are not very different than the potato chips variety.
Consider
this Toronto reporter who, in the wake
of the terrorist
arrests, went to investigate security in the Parliament Buildings.
She writes: “This reporter managed to get within inches
of Cabinet ministers and on to the third floor of Centre Block,
where
Stephen Harper’s office is located, without being asked
for identification.”
Instead
of complaining, shouldn’t
the reporter have congratulated the security people for being
so perspicacious, discerning, hands-off,
respectful, for behaving like servants not masters? I suggest
that this is how a free man would react. This is how I felt
recently when I entered the same Parliament Buildings as
the reporter
without
showing
anything else than a business card I printed on my PC.
But
the self-righteous reporter who walked undisturbed in the
Parliament Buildings with, as she says, “my press pass
tucked under my coat” probably thinks that, after all,
she could be a terrorist.
In
fact, a terrorist would be utterly incapable of confidently
walking into Parliament with an air of “don’t
bloody ask me for any ID card in a country that doesn’t
have any (officially).” On
the contrary, he would have a driver’s licence,
a medicare card, a social insurance card, a passport,
and
would be proud to
carry them—if they were not counterfeit. He thinks
it’s
normal that people be tagged. He wants more of that.
It
is not only smokers that the state has “denormalized,” but
pretty much everybody. Its brainwashing has made us
think that anybody can be a serial killer or a terrorist.
Anybody
is liable to massacre
his wife and children. You and me. A mad monster sleeps
within every one of us. Thus, people expect to be subjected
to prior controls,
to be watched, processed, screened, and frisked—and
say “thank
you.”
However,
it is unthinkable that the people who are granted such extraordinary
powers to protect
us could
become,
or work for,
Hitler or Saddam
Hussein. Only the private citizen is a walking time
bomb. Fortunately, every four years, a warp in the
space-time
continuum makes
these potential madmen suddenly—albeit for
only a few hours—enlightened
enough to elect soft, altruistic, caring masters.
There
was at least one other period in recent history
where (real) homegrown terrorists threatened our
liberties. It
was the late
19th and early 20th centuries, when Marxist anarchists
were roaming all
over Europe and blowing things up. There also lived
at that time a former British MP, Auberon Herbert,
who wrote
a famous
1894
essay entitled “The Ethics of Dynamite” (which
has been reproduced in The Right and Wrong
of Compulsion by the State, a well-worth-reading
book published by Liberty Fund). “If . . .
the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter
in our midst,” Herbert
wrote, “is to make us multiply punishments,
invent restrictions, increase the number of our official
spies, forbid public meetings,
interfere with the press, put up gratings—as
in one country they propose to do—in our House
of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes,
request them, as at Vienna,
and I think
now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their
greatcoats in the vestibules . . . I venture to prophesy
that there lies
before us a bitter and an evil time.”
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