How can a democracy stop domestic traitors?
West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik — his effort to deepen diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union to be able to win recognition of West Germany by Moscow and to attempt to stabilize relations during the Cold War — was condemned by the German right, and by Washington.
As a balancing act, Brandt had imposed a loyalty oath, or “radical decree” on the German public service in 1972. It unleashed a storm of controversy within his party and within Europe. It was compared to Hitler’s loyalty oaths. Privately, Brandt was deeply stung by the attacks, but he argued passionately that a democratic state needed the tools to prevent subversion.
German terrorists like the Red Army Faction — also known as the BaaderMeinhof Gang — were murdering judges and business leaders, and openly calling for the deliberate infiltration of
Marxist activists into German public institutions. Both Baader and Meinhof had been public servants. Brandt argued to friends that pledging not to attempt to overthrow democracy must be a baseline commitment for anyone serving the German people.
There is no more sensitive dilemma in a democracy than limits to free speech and political conviction. The United States is again seized with the question, except this time the terrorists are on the right. FBI counterterrorism teams will probably return to the massive surveillance they performed on Black activists and American Communists. In Canada, we need to assess how to manage the threats posed by white supremacists and Nazis, as well.
In Germany today, the challenge also comes from the right. A special forces group in the German army was found to be home to hundreds of extremists, some of whom seemed to have hoarded massive arms dumps, and were apparently planning the murder of leading politicians.
Their intelligence community has been harshly criticized for its failure to uncover this.
Similarly, the FBI has always been accused of treating white terrorists far more lightly than Black activists. In Canada, the same was true until recently. CSIS’s predecessor, the RCMP Security Service, spied on Tommy Douglas, along with many other politicians and trade union leaders. Even today, CSIS has refused to release what files it held on one of Canada’s most revered political icons.
To give the new CSIS leadership its due, they have worked hard to establish a more balanced approach in recent years, hiring widely from communities that might be open to infiltration by violent groups, and monitoring the connections between potentially violent white supremacists. Yet it will always be a fraught policy domain: Yes, the state must protect itself from violent attack or internal subversion, but where is the bright line between that obligation and spying on law-abiding citizens?
In Washington, we saw two acts that most constitutional scholars agree crossed that line: Trump encouraged a violent attack on Congress, and thousands obeyed him. There can be no tolerance for such seditious rhetoric or the use of violence in the legislatures of the nation. Perhaps now is the time for a more open and searching discussion of how to manage this nightmare, rising quickly as a concern at a moment when racial and religious tensions have never been higher.
There are several scholars and institutes that wrestle with these issues and the cybersecurity threats to Canada — internal and foreign networks that promote this vicious nonsense.
Among the most respected is one created and led by Ron Deibert, The Citizen Lab, at U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. Perhaps a team of citizens and experts might be commissioned to study best practices and the successes and failures of others in controlling exhortations to violence and race hatred in social media’s darker corners.
The German “radical decree” was gradually unwound in the early ’90s, but the conflict it sparked has not been resolved: How does a democracy protect itself from domestic traitors?
And in another of the vast number of political ironies in every democracy, Willy Brandt was forced to resign when it was discovered by a leak from a political rival that the East Germans had placed a top spy as a senior adviser to him many years earlier.