I haven’t had much to say in recent weeks. I’ve been preoccupied with trying to understand the ethos that’s presented itself since October 7. It’s been forming for many years – even in the 1980s “political correctness” was becoming a thing. But its current incarnation is something I don’t recognize from the Canada I grew up in.
In the aftermath of the Second World War there was a widespread sentiment that we, humanity, had to do better. The United Nations was formed. Eleanor Roosevelt was put in charge of the committee drafting what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One of its aims was that “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected.”
The Declaration was always aspirational. In Roosevelt’s United States institutionalized discrimination was widely evident; despite considerable progress since the 1940s there are some who argue that it still exists. Similarly in Canada. While many of the barriers for Indigenous people, such as the pass laws, have been abolished, Canadian “Indians” are underrepresented in Canada’s leadership positions. Nonetheless, high-minded aspirations like those in the Declaration used to guide progressives.
Something has changed. Basic human rights are no longer seen as universal, but rather conditional. Conditional on the group to which someone is thought to belong. In the view of the mob, Jews, for example, no longer have the right to security of the person. The rape, torture and murder of some 1,300 Israelis on October 7th has been celebrated in the streets in Canada and elsewhere. The epithets of “settler” and “colonizer” justify, in the minds of the woke, the genocidal aims of Hamas and other such groups.
The mob is fickle when it comes down to which group to recognize. For example, the systematic murder of the Masai in Sudan gets no attention at all. Black lives matter?
This isn’t, yet, the view of the majority. Rather this hatred is celebrated by a loud minority. Its tentacles have reached into the universities, into public bodies, and unions. It is nurtured by some immigrants who bring the conflicts of their home countries with them into Canada. That so many Canadian youth find it persuasive is a damning indictment of our education system, and in particular the abysmal state of history education.
There has been some backlash. Some law students in Ontario are now finding that jobs aren’t available to those who signed anti-Israeli letters. That is the real world. It’s come back to bite some. Hopefully the resistance to the new ethos will continue, and the pendulum can swing back to a truly universal recognition of human rights.