National Post (National Edition)
REX MURPHY PLUS MORE COMMENT,
It doesn't take much reflection, actually it doesn't or shouldn't take any at all, to conclude that in a democracy, equipped with a free press, set elections, the right of free association, and a very broad appreciation of public protest, violence against people or property, on any scale, should never be accepted as a legitimate political expression.
Violence is wrong. Rioting is wrong. And it should be universally condemned whatever its source, and under whatever cause it sometimes seeks to offer it a spurious legitimacy.
America has seen a whole stream of violence this election year. Under the opportunistic use of BLM banners and the wretched so-called Antifa movement, well over a dozen cities have been plagued by rioting, arson, “occupations,” attacks on police, public mayhem and mob beatings. These have been treated, as they emphatically should not have been, with underplayed reporting, denial of the violence on display, and frequently by some sort of contorted “justification” by some elected officials.
In Seattle, the occupation of the central part of the city was originally described by its mayor as the beginning of a “summer of love.”
Back in those early days I had occasion to note that “It is a very dangerous moment in a democracy when violence and vandalism begin to take on even a sliver of legitimacy or normalization. It is a dangerous moment when a valid cause is manipulated (Black Lives Matter for example) or used as cover for trashing businesses, harassing citizens, torching buildings and rioting in the streets.”
“American politics has slipped off the rails. The intensity of partisanship has, in modern times, never been higher. In such an environment, the idea that some cause has singular virtue — that it can permit elements of intimidation, physical confrontations, and attacks on the police — may seem tempting, but it is never right.”
It is never right is the key phrase. Just as the disgusting, disheartening and tragic events in Washington this week were off the spectrum, an insult to the democratic idea itself, and are without any rationalization. Violence is the negative, the antimatter, if you will, of democracy.
Violence is also insidious in a manner not often recognized. And citizens of any democratic country should be constantly alert whenever it obtains or seems to obtain a sliver of legitimacy.
In that same earlier piece it was noted, referencing the COVID crisis, that “We've learned much over the past six months or so about the nature of contagion, how fast it can spread and the damage it can do to individuals and society at large. Violence has its contagious properties, as well. Ignored, tacitly endorsed and endured for a while, it has a wicked capacity to leap over the taboos against it. It is also, for some, their favoured, if detestable, mode of public action. They like it because they do not value democracy.”
The famous saying, likely falsely attributed to Jefferson, that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” has great merit if it points to the need always to detect and condemn violence in politics at its earliest manifestation.
Political systems, the functioning of large societies, the easy interplay of citizens in a modern, technologically endowed society — all these we take for granted without recognizing how long it took to build such systems, to achieve such interplay.
Real, decent, secure democracies are built over time. The codes — moral, social and legal — that enable our security and comfort do not fall from the sky: they have been built over generations, and we in this present day are their fortunate inheritors. But they are also, as history will instruct, fragile.
If I will be forgiven another excerpt from the earlier piece: “Societies are built over a long time, with great effort, and are the culmination of myriad compromises and adjustments achieved in the school of often painful experiences. We rarely perceive, or put in the front of our minds, how fragile our political systems are and how vulnerable democracies are to assaults from within. We can lose what took generations to build in a single, careless moment.”
We should look upon the events in Washington as a vast caution against allowing any manifestations of violence and extra-legal protest the slightest tolerance. And perhaps, take some painful comfort that the scale of that riot, and the great, sad symbolism of where and when it took place — in the halls of the U.S. Congress, days before a new presidency — will install a profound awareness that politics must always be practised with the boundaries of civility, mutual respect and temperate exchange.
These are the pillars of the temple. Any and every violent manifestation is its desecration.