FORCES Honour Committee member Pierre Lemieux writes about the abuse of nationalism in Canada.
The important concept of Pierre’s piece lies in the concept that “Whatever the government tells us, nationalism is necessarily about honoring the state and imposing the majority’s values on the minority.” Pierre’s article is accessible via the link at the bottom of this page. Our commentary on it follows here.
"…Imposing the majority’s values on the minority".
Too many people have been conditioned to say the words “free and democratic” in one breath, as if they were inseparable things. They are not at all. A country can be democratic but absolutely not free. When the (real or perceived) majority imposes behaviours on the minority to the point that no space is reserved for the minorities to be as they choose to be, calling such a country a free country is a joke and an insult to intelligence. And in that case, the state cannot be honoured, or even respected, and it becomes the duty of any free man to subvert it.
Only fools can believe that when smokers, gun owners, drinkers, or kite flyers cannot smoke, own a gun, drink, or fly a kite, that a country so arranged is still a free country on the grounds that the “majority” does not want these freedoms. Only fools can think that majorities hold more important values than do minorities. On what grounds, if not on those of arrogance and prevarication? On those same grounds blacks, Jews, gays and women were kept under heel for centuries in perfectly functional democracies – the same democracies that now want to forbid smokers from being smokers because the majority does not want them to be that way. It even tries to convince them that they are "sick" so it can “help” them quit.
Yeah, right. No more than a few decades ago the “majority” wanted to “help” homosexuals to get therapy so they could get straight on the pretence that homosexuals were sick – but on the real basis that they were unpleasant for the “majority.” So they forced gays into closets in the same way they are now forcing smokers into closets: through insults, contempt and social pressure, segregation and exclusion. Only when gays used force and gave the majority a bloody nose did the majority understand.
Smokers and other target groups have not learned that lesson yet. They they keep hiding and try to comply. Gays have not truly learned that lesson either, as much of the gay rights movement (under the mighty influence of the money from the Tobacco Control and that of Big Pharma) wants to “help” smokers to get "straight" and become non-smokers. Smokers are unpleasant to the elitist activists although gays as a group tend to smoke rather heavily. Thus gay prohibitionists, identifying themselves as part of the non-smoking majority, care to oppress even those with their sexual lifestyle, identifying their own as the "other." The will to oppress is of the same brand that was until recently used against homosexuality itself. Antismoking is vicious puritanism. Straight and gay puritans now lecture as a chorus. Same trash, different pile.
The objection here would be that a homosexual cannot quit being so, but a smoker can. We call BS on that one: with sufficient oppression and intimidation, both can be coerced to quit. Does that make it right? Of course not. Furthermore, it is a ridiculous statement, for it claims that the right of being sodomized is more important (or fundamental) than the right to smoke! In both cases, it is an expression of one’s personality, a mental architecture, and a personal choice that no one – and we mean no one, majority included – has the right to influence, no matter what. Furthermore, the majority does not have the right to influence one’s children with its values, so that the child becomes something different than what the parent wants, and a product of social conformity.
We leave those who hold the untenable belief that the majorities have the right to modify the behaviour of minorities through the state with a question to ponder on. If, sixty years ago, a pill would have been available to turn the gay minority into straight, would you have been right to demonize and persecute that group to “help” it be like the “majority” of the time, thus force the pill? After all, there are (truly) scientific demonstrations that the gay lifestyle exposes its members to a greater risk of death and disease. Your answer, most likely, is “no”.
But then, why do you want the smoker or the drinker to take the pill that makes him quit? * Why do you want the fat to take the pill that makes him lean, or that controls his diet? Their lives are their lives. Why then do you condition their children to be different than they are by administering lies and exaggerations through the school system? Here is the unpleasant answer: because you want to eradicate the drinkers, the smokers, and the fat from society in the same way that "queers" and "niggers" (please forgive the words!) had to be "eradicated". Face it: there is no difference. If you feel that way and you support those methods, you are like all the bigots of yore; there has been no "social progress", but just a change of targets.
Pierre’ article deals only briefly with the smokers’ rights movement in speaking generally of the difference between the tyranny of the majority and liberty. Liberty is on the wane in many nations and in many ways. There is no finer example of this than the oppression of smokers. Every smoker, and every free man, has a duty to fight back. Otherwise we shall all keep suffering, ever more, under fanatical tyranny.
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* Even assuming that all the lies spoken about smoking are true, the cost of the smoker’s lung cancer to society is no different than that of the promiscuous homosexual’s AIDS – actually, it is much smaller. True, there are far fewer "flaming" homosexuals than there are smokers, but the costs of AIDS therapies are immensely higher than those of "smoking-related" diseases. Yet we hear a lot of BS on the (false) “cost” of “smoking-related diseases” (all multifactorial and never scientifically demonstrable to be caused by the behaviour) to society, but none about the cost of homosexuality-related diseases (all monofactorial and all and always scientifically demonstrable to be caused by the behaviour.) Thus public health’s "alarms" are the product of dodging political correctness against defenceless targets far more than they are products of objective reality.
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