I wonder how many of these liberal Canadians fretting about conflagrations spreading from orchestra to proscenium know they’re quoting:
a) an American;
and, better yet,
b) an American judge upholding espionage charges against an anti-war protester.
“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, supporting the indictment of Charles Schenck for distributing leaflets urging draftees not to serve in the First World War.
That’s the “fire”: Cindy Sheehan at a weekend protest in Berkeley.
As The National Post’s Colby Cosh pointed out, by that standard thousands of Canadian liberals would have been rounded up for protesting the war in Afghanistan.
Many of my leftie critics also say that my interest in the politico-cultural aspects of demographics makes me a eugenicist. Er, no. Again, that’s your boy: Big Government enforced-sterilization eugenicist Oliver Wendell Holmes.
My critics then say, okay, even if you’re not a eugenicist, you are a Broadway theatre critic and therefore can’t be expected to understand demography and other geopolitical issues more complicated than the ingenue’s Act Two tap solo. Fair enough. But, it’s precisely because I’m a musical comedy bore who was fifth row central for the opening night of Hitchy Koo Of 1917 that I’m fully aware the analogy was already ridiculous by the time Justice Holmes delivered it. Gas-lit 19th century playhouses were fire-risks; the electrified Winter Garden on the Broadway of 1919 wasn’t. The fragrant Victorian allusion was obsolescent even at first utterance.
Colby Cosh makes two further points about Holmes’ metaphor: “Anyone who uses it is openly comparing a mass public contemplating a political argument to a rampaging herd of terror-stricken animals.” Aside from the fundamental condescension therein, it would seem the herd mentality is most evident among those brain-dead sophisticates who stampede to recite the fire-in-a-theatre line as if it’s the most penetrating insight ever articulated. Even if it were, it’s entirely irrelevant in a Canadian context. Note Holmes’ words: “falsely shouting fire in a theatre.” Under the “hate speech” provisions of Canada’s Criminal Code, truth is no defense: even if the theatre really is ablaze, you’re still guilty.
And, needless to say, today half the folks who think it’s wrong to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre think it’s okay to shout “Allahu Akbar!” on a crowded commuter plane taking off from Minneapolis. In 2008, the BBC reported on some Scandinavian disturbances under the following headline:
“Youths”, huh? Like the “youths” in the French riots of 2005. Youths of no other discernible characteristics. Let’s take a wild guess here. Would the “Swedish city” happen to be “Malmö”? Why, amazingly, yes. As the BBC reported:
Dozens of youths have rioted in the southern Swedish city of Malmö for a second consecutive night, setting cars on fire and clashing with police.
While we’re on a roll, would it happen to be the part of Malmö known as “Rosengard”? Why, right again! From a Reuters picture caption:
Police extinguish burning barricades on the main road in the immigrant-dominated suburb of Rosengard in Malmö in southern Sweden, early December 19, 2008. The fire department considered the area to be too risky to enter with their personnel.
“Immigrant-dominated”, eh? Is that a way of saying it’s the most heavily Muslim neighborhood of Sweden’s most Muslim city? Ah, well, let’s not go that far. All the BBC is prepared to suggest is that the otherwise non-specific youths’ riotous activities were “linked to the closure of an Islamic center”.
Not only is there no freedom to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, but in a burning city feel free to shout “Go back to sleep!” for another decade or three.
In a splendidly barristerial wind-up to the Vancouver show trial, Maclean’s counsel Julian Porter, QC stood before the three pseudo-judges of the kangaroo court and declared:
Against the argument that you cannot cry fire in a crowded theatre: Oh yes, you can – you must, if in your considered view there is a fire. In that case there is a duty to cry fire.
Well said. The theatre is burning. And the best evidence of that is a kangaroo court in a citadel of the west bending over backwards to insist otherwise.
EPITAPH
Pompey now desired the honour of a triumph, which Sylla opposed… Pompey, however, was not daunted; but bade Sylla recollect that more worshipped the rising than the setting sun.
EXIT MUSIC
The song of civilizational self-loathing
A COUPLE OF years ago, an Australian reader wrote to say he was beginning to feel as Robert Frost did in “A Minor Bird”:
My correspondent’s unceasingly cheeping bird was Islam. He was fed up waking every morning and reading of the latest offence taken by the more excitable Mohammedans. If memory serves, this exhaustion was prompted by a Muslim protest outside Westminster Cathedral demanding death for the Pope. It was organized by a fellow called Anjem Choudhary, who says that “whoever insults the message of Mohammed is going to be subject to capital punishment.” But then again it might have been some other provocation entirely – say, the chocolate swirl on the top of a Burger King dessert carton that an aggrieved customer complained bore too close a resemblance to the Arabic script for “Allah” (the offending menu item was subsequently withdrawn). If you’re that eager to take offence, it’s not difficult to find it. Or as President Bush said to me around the same time: “If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoons.”
Which would make a great bumper sticker. It encapsulates perfectly not only the inability of the perpetually aggrieved to move on, millennium-in millennium-out, but also the utter lack of proportion.
Anyway, my New York Times bestseller (and Canadian hate crime) America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It is released in paperback across the Dominion’s bookstores this week, and, if a mere excerpt in Maclean’s was enough to generate two “human rights” prosecutions, the softcover edition should be good for a full-blown show trial followed by a last cigarette and firing squad – although, this being Canada, there’ll be no last cigarette. (To mark the paperback launch, I’ll be in Toronto at the Bay & Bloor branch of Indigo on Wednesday May 7th with my old pal Heather Reisman. So do come along if you’re interested in hearing what the book’s about, or if you’re an Ontario “Human Rights” Commissar and you’d like to arrest me.) In any event, with a new round of promotional interviews looming, several readers wrote to ask if I ever felt like my Australian paclass="underline" Don’t I wish the Islamic bird would just fly away? Wouldn’t it be nice not to be up to your neck in jihad 24/7?