-from the National Post By George Jonas (May 17, 2014)
A society drifting into a police state displays some early warning signs. They’re not too subtle and I very much doubt if they require previous exposure to tyranny to detect.
Ironically, one is a demand for more freedom and democracy, along with a wider distribution of political power and human rights.
In the jungle screeching birds and chattering monkeys trace the route of a predator on the prowl. In our neck of the woods, scholarly and media voices perform the same function. It begins by academic thinkers discovering rights and freedoms nobody knew existed, or rather everybody knew they existed, but not that they were rights and freedoms. They were viewed as legitimate ambitions at best, and at worst as sins and vices, or even crimes. Still, now that they’re known to be rights and freedoms, i.e. constitutional values in a democracy, they have to be given their due.
All right, so go ahead and implement them, you might say — but here’s the rub: Often such newly minted rights and freedoms run headlong into freedoms and rights established much earlier and regarded as fundamental. They include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and so on. They remain on the books as freedoms, but their exercise in a direction not approved by the state now becomes known variously as sexism, racism, homophobia and Islamophobia, along with other phobias and isms that have been reduced from philistine norms to hidebound, antediluvian discriminatory practices, very likely human rights violations, possibly criminal offences, and arguably psychiatric conditions, at least in some cases.
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