Tom Flanagan, University of Calgary political science
professor, right-wing pundit, and mentor and former senior advisor to
Prime Minister Harper, has earned himself more international media
attention during the past week than even he may have an appetite for.
On November 30th, Flanagan spoke as one of the regular
panelists on CBC Television’s national political analysis program, Power
and Politics with Evan Solomon. Staring into the camera, while across
the bottom of the television screen there appeared a banner reading "WIKILEAKS
LATEST: New document mentions PM Stephen Harper," Flanagan had this to
say about Julian Assange, the founder and editor of Wikileaks:
"Well, I think Assange should be assassinated, actually.
I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or
something."
Evan Solomon’s reaction was delayed—and when it finally
came, thumpingly stupid. After letting Flanagan outline for nearly ten
seconds his reasons for advocating political murder, he broke in at
last, saying: "Tom, that’s pretty harsh stuff, just for the record,
that’s pretty harsh stuff."
Flanagan responded to this interruption with what appears
to have been a joke: "Well, I’m feeling very manly today." But making it
clear that his initial remarks were seriously intended, he wrapped up
his contribution to the program with a parting shot: "I wouldn’t feel
unhappy if Assange disappeared." This sounds rather as though, after
proposing a murder contract and a drone attack, he was offering Obama a
third form of assassination: how about a death-squad "disappearance"?
Solomon responded, echoing his earlier feebleness: "Well, I’ve gotta
say, Tom Flanagan calling for that, that’s pretty strong stuff...."
One of the most lucid comments to date on this disgusting
episode has come from Calgary Herald journalist and University of
Calgary alumnus Kris Kotarski, in a public letter calling on Dr.
Elizabeth Cannon, the university’s President, "to condemn Dr. Flanagan
in the harshest possible terms."
"Better than most," Kotarski writes, "a professor of
political science should understand that academic freedom is not
possible without political freedom, and that political freedom cannot
survive in a climate where journalists and opponents of a ruling regime
hear public intellectuals advocate for their assassination on the
nightly news. If this were a Russian, Chinese or Iranian intellectual
calling for the murder of a regime opponent, Canadians would be
appalled. Considering Canada’s proud tradition of political freedom, it
is all the more offensive to hear an active member of the University of
Calgary faculty and the former chief of staff and campaign manager for
the sitting Prime Minister do the same" (http://censureflanagan.wordpress.com/). Â
As one would expect, there have been attempts both by
Flanagan and by his supporters in the media to explain his remarks away
as an ill-judged attempt at humour. For example, Sarah Petz has written
in Macleans: "Joking about the assassination of a major public figure is
terrible [...]. However, considering it was obviously a bad joke and not
a serious incitation to commit violence, maybe it’s time for everyone to
move on."
Petz likens Flanagan’s comments in the video footage to
"something your conservative uncle would say in a drunken argument over
an awkward family dinner" ("Let Flanagan’s remarks die," Macleans [4
December 2010]). But while there may have been a note of brutal
flippancy in his tone, Flanagan was stone-cold sober. The only jest in
his statement was the inane Neo-Con in-joke about "feeling very manly
today." Some people of Flanagan’s political leanings—men like Dick
Cheney, John Bolton, and George W. Bush—seem to find the quasi-erotic
charge they get from making threats of violence invigorating, even
amusing. Others might wonder how manly it is to find one’s pleasure in
bullying and terrorizing people.
It’s perhaps just as well that the video footage of this
CBC program has gone global, together with explanations of Flanagan’s
close links to our current Prime Minister. Julian Assange, let us remind
ourselves, is not just the "major public figure" that Macleans calls
him: he has for several years taken a leading role in what is arguably
the most courageous and the most significant journalistic work currently
ongoing anywhere in the world.
In an age in which the "memory hole" imagined by George
Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 has become a literal reality, the
work of Wikileaks is crucial. Assange has himself pointed out in public
lectures and interviews that news reports are now routinely deleted by
media corporations, both from their online archives and from their
indexes, leaving behind nothing but a "document not found" message for
search-engine inquiries; while in the UK some 300 news stories,
including one about a deliberate chemical spill that injured over
100,000 people, are currently smothered by court orders that make it
illegal even to mention the existence of a court order blocking
publication of the facts.
Moreover, the US government has been moving steadily
toward a situation in which its agencies possess something approaching
what Admiral John Poindexter called "total intelligence awareness,"
while citizens are increasingly confined to a corresponding state of
ignorance on all matters of importance. Lawrence Davidson explains the
strategy:
"Democratic elites have learned that they do not need to
rely on the brute force characteristic of dictatorships as long as they
can sufficiently control the public media environment. You restrict
meaningful free speech to the fringes of the media, to the ‘outliers’
along the information bell curve. You rely on the sociological fact that
the vast majority of citizens will either pay no attention to that which
they find irrelevant to their immediate lives, or else they will believe
the official story line about places and happenings of which they are
otherwise ignorant. Once you have identified the official story line
with the official policy being pursued, loyalty to the policy comes to
equate with patriotism. It is a shockingly simple formula and it usually
works." ("On the Historical Necessity of Wikileaks," MWC News [4
December 2010],
http://mcwnews.net/focus/editorial/7045-historical-necessity-of-wikileaks.html)
Â
While it is undoubtedly embarrassing for American elites
(whom one hesitates to grace with the word "democratic") to have the
dirty linen of their diplomatic double-dealings exposed to the world,
their most urgent concern seems to be to ensure that as little as
possible of the Wikileaks material becomes known in any organized way to
the American public. Hence the censorship being exercised by the New
York Times (in contrast to the manner in which The Guardian and Der
Spiegel are releasing the material that they all possess)—and hence also
the vitriolic hatred expressed toward Julian Assange by Hillary Clinton,
Newt Gingrich, and Bill O’Reilly, and the death-threats issued against
him by Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and William Kristol.
Noam Chomsky has remarked that "Perhaps the most dramatic
revelation [of the leaked cables] is the bitter hatred of democracy that
is revealed both by the U.S. government—Hillary Clinton, [and]
others—and also by the diplomatic service" (http://chomsky.info/interviews/20101130.htm).
The paroxysms of loathing now being directed at Julian Assange are
another expression of that same hatred of democracy.
While most Canadians are already aware of our own
government’s repeated demonstrations of contempt for democratic
principles and practice, understanding the implications of Tom
Flanagan’s behaviour remains important. Canada’s standards of public
discourse have decayed to the point at which our national broadcaster is
not ashamed to carry an open incitement to political murder made by the
leading ideologue of the governing party, a former and for all we know
continuing close associate of Prime Minister Harper. It is dismaying to
recognize that our media system includes, at its centre, people for whom
the open-eyed advocacy of lawless violence is something merely to shrug
off, like an off-colour joke, as "pretty strong stuff."
But acceptance of that kind of dismissal is only possible
so long as Canadians continue to believe that our governing elites have
always operated at a safe distance from such totalitarian tactics as
those recommended by Tom Flanagan. Is that in fact the case, or is our
belief perhaps conditioned by effective control of what Davidson calls
the "public media environment"?
How many of us know about Canada’s central role in the
overthrow of Haiti’s duly elected democratic government in February
2004, or about the role of Canada’s military in facilitating—or at the
very least doing nothing to prevent—the campaigns of political terror,
massacre and rape that followed the coup? Or about the fact that Canada
exercised effective control over a post-coup prison system in Haiti that
even the Organization of American States condemned as horrifying? (The
Deputy Minister of Justice who ran that system was both appointed and
paid by the Canadian International Development Agency.) Or about the
role of the RCMP in providing training and tutelage for a reconstituted
Haitian National Police that engaged in documented death-squad
activities against civilians between 2004 and at least 2006, and is
suspected of involvement in such crimes as the "disappearance" of human
rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine in August 2007? (Should we not
feel some degree of responsibility for these crimes? Might it be in any
way significant that Lovinsky was "disappeared" just three weeks after
having annoyed Canadian authorities in Haiti by trying to organize a
demonstration against Stephen Harper’s brief visit to the island in
July?)[1]
The Wikileaks cables apparently include more than 1,800
documents emanating from Ottawa (whether from American diplomats posted
there or from Canadian authorities communicating with the US is
unclear). Their contents may be entirely confined to banal and routine
matters. Or they may perhaps provide further substantiation of the fact
that crimes of state terror of the kind Tom Flanagan thought it
appropriate to recommend on CBC Television—far from being mere rhetoric,
let alone a "joke"—touch Canadians more closely than most of us have
been able to recognize.
Should the Wikileaks cables turn out to contain material
of this kind, we might expect to hear angry denunciations of Julian
Assange from Liberal as well as from Conservative quarters—for Canada’s
participation in the Haitian coup of 2004 was decided and acted upon by
the governments of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, whose policies the
Harper Conservatives have in this respect merely continued.
One may hope that in such a case, Canadian public opinion
would respond with a firm defence of our democratic right to know about
and to control the doings of our elected representatives and public
servants—and to ensure that their actions remain in conformity with
domestic and international law.
As for the present, I note with interest that Vancouver
lawyer Gail Davidson has filed a complaint against Tom Flanagan with the
Vancouver police and the RCMP (see Charlie Smith, "Police complaint
filed after Tom Flanagan calls for assassination of Wikileaks’ Julian
Assange, Straight.com [4 December 2010],
http://www.straight.com/article-362941/vancouver/lawyer-files-criminal-flanagan-assassination-wikileaks-julian-assan).
I’m happy to endorse a comment posted by ‘Delmazio’ in response to this
news: "We need more people like Mr. Julian Assange who are willing to
speak truth to power, and encourage the free flow of information which
directly affects public policy decisions. If we value freedom of
information, transparency, openness, and democracy, we ought to praise
not to condemn such efforts."[2]
Notes
[1] Information on these subjects can be found in my
essay "The Dignity of the Haitian Women (and Canada’s Shame)."
[2] Some may be concerned about the news that Sweden’s Public
Prosecutor’s Office announced in August 2010 that it intended to arrest
Assange on charges of rape, withdrew the arrest warrant on the same day,
asserting that there was no evidence, and then resurrected the charges
three months later. See the following article by Melbourne barrister
James D. Catlin, who acted for Assange in London in October: "When it
comes to Assange rape case, the Swedes are making it up as they go
along," Crikey (2 December 2010),
http://www.allvoices.com. |