Outing the authoritarians

American playwright Sinclair Lewis never said "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the Bible." The real author of the far more dire prediction was Prof. Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School. Preaching at New York City's famous Riverside Church on Sept. 12, 1938, Luccock warned:

"When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.' "

The first evidence of an authoritarian streak in modern U.S. politics emerged when Senator Joe McCarthy began his witch-hunts of supposed Communists in high places in the early 1950s. Over a decade passed before the spectre raised its head again. Republican presidential nominee Senator Barry Goldwater galvanized the libertarian wing of his party with the dictum that "extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice."

Then the floodgates opened: Richard Nixon broke the law with Watergate. Ronald Reagan did the same in the Iran-Contra affair. Jimmy Carter presided over the creation/funding of the mujahedeen to defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. Late last month, flogging his memoirs, George W. Bush claimed he was "damn right" to approve the water-boarding of three alleged terrorists, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was water-boarded 183 times.

Dick Cheney made the nonchalant declaration "I was a big supporter of water-boarding." Sarah Palin is demanding the U.S. government "hunt down" WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange "with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaida and Taliban leaders." And Mike Huckabee is saying "anything less than execution is too kind a penalty" for what Assange has done.

Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida 9/11 hijackers have triumphed beyond their wildest dreams. Within a decade, they have caused the world's leading democracy and many of its allies to question, if not increasingly abandon, some of democracy's bedrock principles, beginning with the rule of law and freedom of speech and press.

A poll conducted by Pew Research in 2009 found that fully half of Americans think torture is "often" or "sometimes" justified when interrogating terrorists. Only 25 per cent consider it always wrong.

Canada is not immune. As a Harvard professor, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff wrote a treatise appearing to justify mild forms of torture such as sleep deprivation and stress positions.

Conservative gadfly and Sun Media columnist Ezra Levant has publicly stated American soldiers should have killed the wounded 15-year-old child soldier Omar Khadr on the spot in that Afghan firefight. "They should have walked up to him and shot him like a mangy dog."

And on the Nov. 30 edition of the CBC's Power and Politics with Evan Solomon, University of Calgary political scientist Tom Flanagan, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former Conservative campaign chairman, called for Assange's assassination.

"Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually," Flanagan said. "I think (U.S. President Barack) Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something." When Solomon said "That's pretty harsh stuff," Flanagan replied: "Well, I'm feeling very manly today" adding that he wouldn't be unhappy if Assange "disappeared." He subsequently retracted and apologized.

Assange has upset apple carts around the globe with his release of 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. One of those cables disclosed that former CSIS director Jim Judd complained to American officials in 2008 that Canadian courts were tying his agency "in knots" and that a videotaped recording of a tearful Khadr at Guantanamo Bay would trigger "knee-jerk anti-Americanism" and "paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty."

Western democracies should be careful not to lose their souls in their fear of terrorism. History's most eloquent defence of free speech and inquiry remains an address to Parliament in 1644 by British poet and scholar John Milton "on the liberty of unlicensed printing." Here are some extracts from Areopagitica.

"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race... Give me the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength... Let her and Falsehood grapple. Whoever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"

Damaging as the fallout from WikiLeaks is for diplomacy, at least it is outing the authoritarians among us.

Frances Russell is a Winnipeg writer and political commentator.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 9, 2010 A14