Racism is as much at home in Canada as apple pie with ice cream, according to a native Indian spokesman. Racism is also American, British, Russian, Japanese and German. It encompasses most if not all industrial nations, because all countries are class divided into owners and non-owners of the means of life, all are based on the employer versus employee social relationship.
We live in a class-divided, oppressive world system in which an owning class in every country has a monopoly of the means of disseminating ideas because it owns and controls the means of production and distribution. The majority class at the bottom of the social scale is allocated a small measure of free expression is some countries — that is, civil rights, or elbow room for workers to have a say in the running of their own exploitation — and relatively none in others. In some of the older "democracies" free speech exists in a few open-air speaking centers, parks and town or city squares. All other speaking to audiences, distribution of written material or mass broadcasting has to be paid for, and the owning, ruling class possesses most of the property and money. The world's workers do not own and control TV and radio stations, movie studios, churches, "educational" institutions or newspaper chains.
The limited freedoms of speech and assembly are rights granted by the state. As such they are not absolute. They are relative, i.e., concessions, allowed by a dominant class, and partly struggled for by unfree masses. In some countries in the past these rights have been removed without enough protest from the ordinary people to prevent it. This is partly because wage and salary workers are conditioned to accept authority, to follow leaders, as part of the milieu of being separated from most of what they produce. An undemocratic economic process makes them easy targets for fallacious concepts of democracy and freedom which confuse existing rights in "democratic" countries with the freedom which would pertain in a classless society of social equality.
Wherever parasites live off the labor of a lower class, friction and frustration inevitably arise. It is impossible for exploitation to occur without causing problems of hopelessness, insecurity, humiliation and alienation for the exploited majority. A large proportion of "ordinary people", being unaware of the social source of their miseries, fears and frustrations, look for scapegoats to blame their problems on, in various visible minorities.
Prejudice is widespread and usually misconceived. Example, Barbara Amiel of Macleans said racism is a common human vice, as if it was innate, a part of the nature of humans. Sidney Harris, a North American columnist, was near to the fact of the matter when he quoted a psychiatric assessment — "paranoid projection" — and then admitted that "there can be very few of us who do not unthinkingly entertain . . . prejudices about groups other than our own which will not stand in the light of critical examination . . . which serve to bolster our self-esteem".
The world system we live under, which inherently causes racism, obviously has no cure for it. Governments at times directly sponsor racism with extreme nationalism in the interests of what they think to be the profitability of the economy, as in the case of the German Nazi regime and to a lesser degree of the USSR. Canadian governments have, covertly at least, supported bigotry, as in the instances of the internment of Canadian nationals of Japanese ancestry during the early part of the second world war, the vilifying of native Indians in elementary school books, the operations of the Indian Affairs Department, and denying entry of German Jews on the "voyage of doom" ship, the St. Louis, trying to escape the Nazis. But they usually try to keep racism to a minimum, trying to prevent strife and disruption, so as to enhance an "orderly" extraction of profits. Appeals are made for "tolerance" of minorities by workers, and legislation exists to curb the extremist or organized racists.
Two such zealots achieved prominence in the news recently in reference to the anti-semitic sphere of discrimination, through being criminally charged with "wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group". They are Ernst Zündel who, among other things, produced the book The Hitler We Loved and Why, and James Keegstra, former Alberta schoolteacher who indoctrinated his students for fifteen years about the Nazi holocaust being a hoax. They, with several organizations, promote the fiction of an international Zionist conspiracy to rule the earth through a single world government. Acting on a 19th century forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, they cite rich Jews in positions of power who they call the "illuminati". One faction of this faith idolizes Hitler but is contradicted by another which sees him as having been a witless tool of the illuminati.
The judge in Keegstra's trial accepted an argument that the Canadian Charter of Rights "is not meant to guarantee absolute freedom". A Victoria Times/Colonist editorial of July 27 1986 quoted Voltaire's assertion that the right to speak one's mind is absolute, but the editorial inadvertently revealed the limitation of free speech as a mere right granted by the state when it said that" law enforcement agencies will decide if Zündel should be prosecuted for what he has said".
Both men were convicted of spreading hate, but it is the antagonistic, anti-social environment of the present world system which naturally generates hatred, and it is never put on trial. Keegstra was condemned for preaching hatred to a captive audience of school children in their impressionable years. But the state authority, which had him on trial, itself preaches hatred in its schools such as "native people admire and esteem murderers"; "bombing cities is an exciting and courageous activity" (Times/Colonist, August 21, 1986). And leaders and the workers of nations at war with Canada have been portrayed as inferior or evil.
Not surprisingly, Keegstra and Zündel were displeased about being forcibly prohibited from airing their ideas publicly by a government claiming to be a champion of "freedom and democracy". So these two admirers of Hitler, the dictator who ended marginal free speech in Germany fifty years before, with their supporters and their lawyer, Doug Christie, founder of the "right-wing" Western Canada Concept Party, helped in founding the "Canadian Free Speech League". Christie later legally banned a CBC TV docudrama, loosely based on the career of Keegstra, from being broadcast, and he has sued for defamation against parts of the media.
When the League brought Zündel to Victoria to speak at a meeting at which $5.00 was to be charged at the door, an opposing "free speech" body was hastily organized by some liberal-left, labor and church groups called "Coalition for Responsible Free Speech" (CRFS) to stop him. Attempts to hold the meeting in two different halls to talk about free speech (Zündel was forbidden by law to talk about the holocaust) were defeated after threats of violence and a death threat from an unknown source.
The CRFS saw itself as an influence against the occurrence of another anti-Jewish atrocity. They did not appear to know that the history that Keegstra and Zündel were attempting to rewrite was a "history" that had already been distorted by the Allied victors in the second world war, which was fought not for "freedom and democracy" but for the usual reasons of markets, resources and exploitable populations. And it was caused by all of its national participants as they jostled to protect and further their economic interests. The Jews, Gypsies and others of Europe were convenient scapegoats to divert German workers' attention from their own problems, channelling maximum energies toward winning their bosses' war to retrieve and increase the colonies and markets lost in the previous conflagration.
The CRFS adopted the shallow concept of "fighting fire with fire", or trying to defeat undemocratic theory with undemocratic methods. The alternative method of open discussion to defeat racism, by trying to first identify its cause by inviting prominent racists to speak, was attempted by some universities across the country. Most of them were stopped by "anti-racism" groups who, by imitating the evil they wished to stamp out, were really compounding the problem.
The capitalist class cannot allow democratic, free discussion on problems. The social structure demands that they try to keep the useful class, the majority, in political ignorance. The rules of society also use their privileged monopoly of the machinery for spreading ideas to make a dirty word of Socialism, contributing to the docility and passiveness of the millions they oppress. So, there is a perpetual problem for civil rights activists who try to preserve or extend limited free speech against the class dictatorship of the owning minority in the face of changing conditions.
If the solution, for us who must sell our lives for a ration called a wage or salary is to do the best we can with the existing limited rights, which are being gained in more countries, to build up the movement for world socialism and to take democratic political action to change the basis of society. Democracy, i.e., freedom, can be realized only in a society of social equality based on the common (not state) ownership and democratic control of the Earth by and in the interest of its inhabitants.
George Jenkins (Canada)
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