Sex is better than politics. Among other reasons, that's because when it comes to sex, at least you can choose your partner. In politics, your principles could drive you to embrace bedfellows you despise.
Take Ernst Zündel (please). This 65-year-old, a German who has lived in the United States and Canada since 1958, is a Holocaust denier. He is the author of "The Hitler We Loved and Why." He associates with white supremacists. He is a nazi-lover and a Jew-baiter. He gives me the creeps.
And everyone with the slightest respect for free speech should come to his defense.
As I write this, Zündel is on a transatlantic plane, being deported from Canada to Germany. It's an episode more befitting a banana republic with kangaroo courts than a high-minded Western democracy. You see, Zündel has no criminal record. The Canadians decided to kick him out because they don't like what he thinks and says. His writing has long been a thorn in the side of the bien pensants up North, and after 9/11, those folks finally found a way to remove their pesky resident: by using the new "Security Certificate Law." Reminiscent of the shady doings that pass for justice in Franz Kafka's "The Trial," that law allows the government to imprison terrorism suspects without charge, based on secret evidence that does not have to be disclosed to the suspect or his legal counsel.
It's a little like hiding a piñata in one room and giving a blindfolded kid a stick in the next room over. He can flail and hit away, but the whole exercise is necessarily doomed to failure. Zündel's lawyer told the Associated Press last week that a meaningful defense had been out of the question, because it's not known what he and his client were supposed to defend against.
It's disappointing to see my friends in the Great White North engage in such secretive nastiness, and I'm hardly consoled by the fact that the Germans won't behave any better. When Zündel's plane touches down in Europe, he'll go straight to jail. And why? Did he break any laws in Germany? Depends on whom you ask. German prosecutors have long been gunning for Zündel. Denying the Holocaust is a crime over there (which means Germany can imprison you for holding a kooky belief, so that a thought crime can indeed have dire consequences). That Zündel didn't commit this so-called crime on his Heimat's soil is a mere technicality to the German DAs. They argue that his website, while hosted in North America, can be accessed in Germany — which they consider reason enough to add months or years to the prolonged solitary confinement Zündel already underwent in Canada, awaiting trial.
All of this is puzzling, especially on Canada's part. It's a rude awakening to find the Canadian state so weak and osteoporotic that a single incorrigible jackass with a website was said to threaten it (threaten it so much, in fact, that the evidence against him had to remain secret). You'd think that Canadians would demand a little transparency from their justice system. You'd think that their courts could have just shrugged off Zündel's rantings, declining to turn him into a martyr instead of showering him in world-wide publicity. And you'd think that a judge with half a brain would understand that there's something ludicrous and unseemly about fighting a fascist by subjecting him to, well, fascism-by-another-name.
As in America, we Canadians have free speech, and liberty, exactly as far as we're allowed to by a government that believes it's job is not to serve us, but to rule us.
Posted by: Poustman | Wednesday, March 02, 2005 at 03:12 PM