Barrel Strength

Ezra Levant is that man who published the notorious Mohammed cartoons in the Western Standard, and more recently, on his blog. For his pains he has been summoned before the Alberta Human Rights Commission to explain himself, why he should not be punished in some fashion for offending the sensitivities of Islamic militants, including being forced to apologize to the same bigots who want Canada to be subject to Shari’a Law.

You are a reader of a blog. I want to talk about the difference the Internet has made for empowering the literate person, namely you, against the organs of thought control, and persuade you - as if you needed any persuasion - that Levant’s fight is our fight.

The Internet has challenged, and I would say is in the process of destroying, several business models that depended on either the limited bandwidth or the non-existent computational abilities of pre-modern communications systems, in which I would number music distribution, broadcasting and the newspaper.

The business model is not really the issue - it is the changed relationship of power between those who own the old media and those who use the new media. In the main the relationship of the literate classes, such as you and I, to our media is changing for the better. The blog has become a way for the relatively powerless, such as us, to talk back to those who own the distribution systems. In short, we have gained a measure of power that we did not have before. They do not like this. No, I am not talking about owners of old media. They are businessmen and they will probably adapt.

Who, then, are they? They could be anyone, but in our era (post 1970’s) they consist principally of leftists and their new-found Islamic allies who, for different reasons particular to each group, do not want conservatives and other dissidents to offend their sensitivities and challenge their world views. The explosion of possibilities represented by blogs and the Internet means, in effect, that there is so much more thought to control. But as every dictator knows, you do not need to control every expression, you need only punish the conspicuously dissident.

Ezra Levant has been singled out for conspicuous dissidence from the tendency to kowtow to Islamic sensitivities. After all, no one has extended Islam to us. Or have they? (That is a vital issue for another posting).

The freedom to offend is at the core of the freedom of speech. The Alberta Human Rights Commission seems to believe that they have a role in preventing offensive speech. In so doing they are wittingly or unwittingly extending the range of Islamic jurisdiction to non-Islamic populations.

The Internet is allowing us to see how they do it. We can be in the hearing room with Ezra Levant, thanks to a combination of digital cameras, IP addressing systems, search engines, cheap computers, and connections among all of thse devices. Moreover we can be connected to Levant, and he to us, at prices we can afford.

But we depend on laws to keep the paths of communication open, not just technologies. The gains that technology has allowed us can be revoked by hostile regulatory regimes. Up til now the regime governing speech in the Internet is the same as that which governs speech in other areas of life: you do not need a licence to publish, nor are you subject to the prior scrutiny of an organ of the state to obtain the right to publish. This was settled in the United States by the Supreme Court upholding the decision that the Internet was the zone of free speech. The federal court’s decision on Communications Decency Act in ACLU v. Reno was a strong defence of the Internet as a place for multiple conversations. In Canada we reached the same conclusion when the CRTC decision that the Internet was not “broadcasting”.

There are two other models for governing speech besides the one that applies to printing and the spoken word: broadcasting, and telecommunications. The broadcaster is subject to the greatest set of controls on speech that have been devised in a free and democratic society, principally because he uses “scarce” radio spectrum, owned by the government, to reach the public. The broadcaster needs a licence from the state and he is subject to extensive controls on what he might say, including political “balance”.

If you can extend the scope of the Human Rights Commissions into the Internet, you can control speech by making a series of conspicuous examples of those who offend the prevailing conversational shibboleths in leftist circles. No legislator needs to pass a wide-ranging Act for the Control of Speech on the Internet to do this. All you need to do is to expose people, one by one, to the embarrassment, expense, and ritual humiliation by shaming bureaucrats of Human Rights Commissions.

The persecution of free speech by thought controls is eternal. Every man in his generation may be selected to be the one who is singled out, or who singles himself out for attack. Ezra Levant is the voice who must be stilled, according to the evil combination of Islamic fascism and leftist hatred of free discourse. He refuses to go quietly.

What has changed the balance of forces from previous attacks by Human Rights Commissions on unfashionable Christians who think homosexuality is biblically condemned, or veterans associations who will not rent their halls to lesbian marriages, is that Ezra Levant is using the full panoply of Internet technology to confound their attempts to pick us off, one by one.

The first thing to note is that Levant’s arguments before the Human Rights Commission staffer came to us courtesy of YouTube. You can google Levant’s website and read his views, examine the research he has assembled courtesy of the hyperlink system invented by Tim Berners-Lee.

The thing we have grown accustomed to, from blogging, is that we can publish freely. Two, a dozen, three thousand or a hundred thousand people may read our views, or none. What the Human Rights Commissions threaten is that no one will be able to conspicuously say that Islam is bunk, that Communism is a scheme of mass murder, the Jesus never rose from the dead, that global warming is piffle. The regime of Human Rights Commissions will not be a comprehensive tyranny, like a Committee of Public Safety emptying prisons with the guillotine. Rather, I think, it will have the same long-term effect as the Spanish Inquisition, which was to stultify discussion, raise barriers of mistrust between people, create a horror of heresy, and leave no one free from arbitrary procedures.

Fortunately, they can no longer work in the dark. The power of connected people must be trained against the oppressors of free speech. This is your fight. Support Ezra Levant in his work.