I open my daily email from Reader Supported News to encounter a column from yesterday's Toronto Star, one with implications for all so-called democracies, indluding our own. The author, national affairs columnist Thomas Walkom begins by telling us 2 things stand out from the street riots and subsequent police action in Toronto during the previous weekend's G-20 meetings.
The first is the state blatantly abused its powers. Summits legitimately require security; but in this one, governments went over the top. . . .
The second is that most people don't care. Polls show that more than 70 per cent of Torontonians approve of these abuses.
The "logic" of using violence to prove the violence of capitalism or the repressive nature of the government is almost always counterproductive, at least historically, especially (and this is my conclusion) when that violence is perceived as coming from the left.
But that is not why I feel drawn to write about this column.
If you read the column, you will see how Walkom demonstrates how the actions of violent protesters and the repression by the authorities fed on one another. That will not be a new phenomenon. Those of us who lived through the 1960s in this nation, or paid attention to demonstrations and repressions around the world, especially in Europe, in that decade and the next, will see patterns that are all too familiar.
We might wonder if the violence on the part of protesters might not even have been fomented by agents provacateur - undercover police who egged on demonstrators to give authorities the excuse to act repressively: again, those of us old enough to remember the 60s will remember when things like that occurred in this nation, and we have seen at least hints of similar police and intelligence agency misconduct in the years since, both in this nation and in actions fomented by US operatives in other nations.
Yet that is not what bothers me. There is one sentence in the middle, a transitional sentence, that really catches my attention:
In the end, the violence that always lies behind state authority did show itself to those who had assumed they were immune.
Walkom goes on to describe the experience of one 24 year old lawyer who was there as an observer.
But I want to ponder this sentence, starting with this: violence that always lies behind state authority
The idea of government monopoly on the application of force, of violence, is essential to the notion of the social contract. We surrender much of our individual right to use force in return for the protection of our other rights by the government. The police and other authorities are authorized to use the force necessary to protect social order and the people in the society.
Government claim the same right to use force on a larger scale, against actors outside the nation, be they national states or non-national actors.
In each case humanity has in general recognized that this legitimization of force carries with it a risk - of using force merely because one can, and thereby using that force to obtain totalitarian control, to oppress or crush others for economic or political gain or from sectarian hatred or any other reason the human mind can concoct to justify what the own of that mind wants to do.
Thus we have had attempts to control the use of military power, to outlaw or restrict war, to declare certain actions improper, illegal, even in the midst of war. The idea of limits on how wars are to be fought.
Similarly, most governments proclaim in documents and court decrees some limitation on how the government can utilize its monopoly of violence, of force. We proclaim rights protected from governments, wrestle with oversight of law enforcement officials to ensure they do not abuse the access to violence with which we entrust them to protect us.
Andrew MacIsaac, the aforementioned young lawyer, was held for 20 hours, having been taken into custody "under the broad authority of police to detain those they think might be about to engage in a breach of the peace." Ponder that for a moment: in a great democracy (for surely our Northern neighbors qualify as such), police could arrest and detain based on their thoughts about POSSIBLE breach of peace, those actions not subject to review by independent authority. We should understand the implications of this. On the international scale, it is the equivalent of a nation deciding to preemptively attack another nation not because that nation is massing troops for an attack - after all, that is what Israel faced in 1967, when Nasser ordered UN observers out of Sharm el Sheikh, and the world as a whole did not condemn Israel for striking first - but merely because we think they might represent a threat to something we value at some undetermined point in the future. And yes, I am referring to the reasoning of the US administration in the recent past. Such actions - by police or by national governments - are often justified by positing worst-case scenarios: "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" for example.
And often we will be told that the indignities to which those like thee young lawyer were subjected are really not so horrible:
He was not permitted to contact a lawyer; he was kept handcuffed in a cage with others. He was given two cheese sandwiches over the period and three styrofoam cups of water. The open portable toilet in his cage had no toilet paper (MacIsaac tore off part of his shirt sleeve to help a fellow inmate); he was never formally notified of the charges—if any—levied against him.
In police state terms, this is relatively minor. MacIsaac wasn’t chained in stress positions, as he might have been at Guantanamo Bay. Nor was he flayed with rubber cables, as he might have been in Egypt.
And yet, physical abuse such as what this nation has applied to detainees (remember, most have never been charged, and the vast majority we now know are innocent of any action for which we could charge them) at Guantanamo is not the only issue:
But what’s interesting is that some of the elements of classic authoritarian detention were there, albeit in embryonic forms. He was kept deliberately disoriented; usually, he didn’t know what time it was. He was kept uncomfortable; the combination of bound wrists and concrete floor made it impossible for him to sleep. His sense of self-worth was undermined by an array of minor indignities such as the lack of toilet paper.
In particular, he was kept isolated from the outside world. Requests to call a lawyer were never formally denied, just put off to some undefined and never-reached point in the future.
Deprive a person of any sense of dignity. Disorient the person in custody. Break down any ability to resist mentally or emotionally. Compel conformity. And even if that does not work over the long term, in the meantime the person has been disappeared, unable to communicate to others where, why and how s/he is being held. Propagate fear to others that they too, might be disappeared.
There are real threats in the world. We are constantly confronted with finding a balance between order and safety as perceived by those responsible for maintaining it, domestically and internationally, and the notions of liberty, freedom, the ability to dissent and criticize, or sometimes merely the ability to be different - as to religion, politics, economics, or things more simple such as not caring about the World Cup or the World Series. Or even worse - rooting for an opposing team???
Somehow I think it is incumbent upon all of us to consider how much we are willing to surrender to others the use of violence ostensibly on our behalf. For many of us, in positions of authority high or petty (and as a schoolteacher I am in the latter category) how we handle our ability to use violence (in my case, mental and verbal) may tell us how much we are willing to tolerate from others.
If as societies that are ostensibly democratic with limits on uses of force by authorities towards which we are not willing to be constantly vigilant, to ensure that no one has unfettered power without external oversight to use violence, then what now seems "mild" - such as the indignities suffered by attorney MacIsaac and other swept up in Toronto - will all too soon be examples of an almost forgotten past of "mild" repression and application of violence, psychological as well as physical, emotional as well as corporal.
That's a rambling sentence, perhaps an unclear thought.
Simply put, it is this idea: we are are responsible for the use of force by our governmental authorities, local and national. Ostensibly they act in our name. If we do not remain vigilant, if we are not prepared to challenge, if we do not have mechanisms by which we can challenge, then we are abandoning any notion of of government of the people, by the people, for the people - unless as people we acquiesce in the destruction and suppression of individual liberty in the name of order and safety.
And if we so acquiesce, any level of government can gin up, foment, or simply provoke the kind of violence it needs to justify the oppression it wishes to apply.
And then what?
Walkon's column has the title The G20 summit’s grim lessons for civil liberties
It is not just this summit. In our nation it has been recent national political conventions. With the threats of violence on the extremes of our political spectrum it would become easy to justify similar actions more broadly in this nation.
I do not claim answers.
I do think we need to ponder these issues. We need open and honest discussion.
And we need to hold our governmental actors to account for how they use the monopoly of violence we have authorized them to use on our behalf.
Ultimately we are responsible.
For if we are not, the path to a totalitarian state is clear, and we are well down that road, are we not?