The Polite Inquisition: Notes from the Canadian Gulag of Kindness

Where bureaucrats weaponise virtue, and justice dies in a memo. How did human rights bcome the fascism of 'love'?

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“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” — John Stuart Mill.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” — Immanuel Kant.

Let us strip the varnish from the idol. As currently practised in this country, human rights have become a bureaucratic bludgeon wielded by the sanctimonious against the dissenting.

Once born out of the Enlightenment—that dazzling century when the species first dared to believe it could think for itself—human rights law in Canada has metastasised into an authoritarian parody of its origins.

From the Code of Hammurabi to Locke's treatises, to the blood-soaked parchment of the French Revolution, the arc of justice was slow, brutal, and glorious: a promise that “no man would kneel before another without cause”

Today, it consists of complaint forms, appeal loops, and HR-approved gag orders. It wears the vestments of virtue, but under the priestly frocks are blood-stained tools.

At the beginning, human rights sounded noble. Like its American and French forebears, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms asserted the individual as sovereign. Once a cudgel of kings and clergy, the state was to be put on a leash.