Part 2: What If Trudeau Orders an Attack?

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

This is a continuation of my article of February 5, 2022 at RMN, "What should a Canadian Cop Do"?, to which Sacred Scientist posted a reply: "What the RCMP is doing is worshiping a false god of higher ups, statutes, pay checks and false government. The People are real."

I am dealing with an inspiring book entitled "Eutopia," by Philip Allott. It can be mined for many needs. It's not specifically for emergencies, but I think we have to press it into service for the convoy situation, as there is no other book of recent date to give us top-quality guidance. I want to say "infallible" guidance, as I think Allott has got the species-wide picture under control. He knows where law fits and where power fits in any human society, past or present.

Allott, an elderly law professor at Cambridge, understands corruption and is well aware of it, but he does not name names or countries. And the book was published in 2016, so it does not know of the Covid pandemic. But I am now going to pose two questions, related to the Canadian convoy, for which generalized answers can be found in Allott's book -- Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World.

1. Can Trudeau legally set about to handle the truckers violently, such as by forcing them at gunpoint to leave Ottawa?

2. If government gets violent, how should the truckers, and other citizens, respond?

You may think I am going to reach for my copy of a Constitution, which is where I usually go for the legal goods. But, no, I am going to Eutopia, from which I'll now give faithful paraphrasing (or, if you see double quote marks, exact quotes). The paragraph numbering is Allott's system. Anything in square brackets is from me, MM.

Law, Authority, and Society

10.1: "Law is the anatomy and physiology of a society." 10.2: Law is made in the mind and imposed on the world.

10:18: It is based on customs, conventions, social demands and expectations. A society is a labyrinth of obligation and self-imposed necessity. 10.20: Custom involves worship of our ancestors and accumulated wisdom. It emerges from the natural purpose of society -- our survival and flourishing. 10.21: Law is intrinsically malleable; it must often change to suit new needs. Legislated law has a hinterland of customary law.

10.22: Statutory law covers a category of situations in abstract universal form. It is then the job of judges to particularize it in relation to a unique case. Common law is formed inductively by universalizing the legal principles underlying cases. "Law courts are an integral part of the ... self-creating of society and hence socially accountable for their decisions...."

10:24 "The central problem of law in human society is its relation to power. All law is an exercise of power by human beings, in its making, application and enforcement. As a consequence, there can be good law and bad law, good courts and bad courts.... Law can be a means of oppression and exploitation."

10.26 Until recently, no known society theorized that its legal power is simply a product of physical power -- law is violence by other means. The social reality of many societies in history may seem to demonstrate such a crazy theory.

10.29 "Two particular aspects have predominated in the installing of law in the deep-structure of society -- the problem of law in relation to the totality of society; the problem of the role of law in the control of public power." Both are crucial to the task of re-imagining and remaking the place of law now, and also in regard to international law.

10.30 "Is human freedom prior to law, such that law is a limitation to freedom? Or is human freedom determined by law, so that freedom is that which is left free by law?" 10:33 Rule of Law asserts the authority of law over all public power.

10.44 "A society is a massive structure of artificial order and artificial necessity." The resulting social reality has a network of legal relations that bind the society to human beings and human beings to one another. "Law is an expression of a society's collective will to become what it chooses to be."

10.45 "A society's highest common interest is its survival and flourishing" and that of its members. [Cicero: Salus populi suprema lex esto: The welfare of the people is the highest law.]

10:48 "Values are the basis of judgements that we make, individually and collectively.... The human imagination plays a big part in forming our values, in the way that we imagine ourselves and our societies...our potentialities and our obligations, our freedom and our necessity...."

10.58 "... the gradual and painful emergence of the ...idea of the Rule of Law was directly connected with profound changes in some societies in the fourteenth century. The sudden development of those societies was primarily economic. Their collective wealth increased rapidly and the center of gravity... moved in favor of newly empowered social classes."

10.65 "It would take centuries of evolutionary constitutionalism to find the basis for the authority of a society's law within the authority of that society as a whole.... On many occasions the struggle led to civil war." 10.66: "Self-constitutionalising societies watched each other and learned from each other."

The Trudeau Question

So, Dear Reader, how're you doing so far on finding an answer to the question "Can Trudeau legally set about to handle the truckers violently, such as by forcing them at gunpoint to leave Ottawa?" My article today is definitely about the crisis in Canada, not about philosophy for philosophy's sake.

A few days ago, in my article entitled "What Should the Canadian Police Do about the Convoy?", I described the 1932 tent city of US veterans, and their demand to get help from Congress -- specifically an accelerated payment of their WWI bonus. That's similar to the truckers' demand for Parliament in Ottawa to lift the mandates.

(Note: Prime Minister Trudeau is the head of Parliament which is not like a US president being head of the Executive branch.)

I encouraged the average RCMP cop to disobey illegal orders. That was easy for me to do because it is LEGAL to disobey illegal orders. But now, starting February 6, 2022, the Canadian government has said it does plan to attack the convoy if the truckers refuse to leave.

I still say that an order like that, to attack non-criminals, is illegal and shouldn't be obeyed. But where I was addressing the cops in that earlier article, I am addressing the truckers now. What should they do?

The excepts above, from Allott's book Eutopia, are all from Chapter 10, which is entitled "New Law: Human Flourishing through Self-Ordering." His in-depth message is that we humans make the law. We pull it together from past customs, from high values, from borrowing. It changes over the generations in reaction to new circumstances.

Today the typical citizen does not realize that. She thinks she must find out what the law is, on paper -- known as black-letter law -- and decide what is legal for her to do. Not that there's anything wrong with that approach -- I highly recommend it. But when a crazy or horrific situation arises, it may well be that the black-letter law does not offer a reasonable way out of the crisis.

The Crisis

When there is a crisis, you have at least got to acknowledge that there is a crisis. There are tens of thousands of people in Canada protesting the mandates right now. The most visible ones are the truckers with their huge vehicles. Those are also the noisiest, honking their horns more or less continuously.

Until yesterday, Ottawa was not a scene of hardship, other than for its freezing temperature, as community spirit was at an all-time high. People were thrilled by their new-found solidarity and willingness to tell the politicians off. Love was in bloom on Parliament Hill.

But then, an announcement was made that the government would seize the money -- and did seize the money -- that people had donated, via GoFundMe.com, to help pay the truckers for their lost wages and travel costs. (Ten million Canadian dollars: 800,000 USD.)

I imagine this was done to sow anger in the crowd, and to actually provoke some truckers to lash out and spoil the serenity. Then the government did an Eisenhower (or a McArthur) and told the convoy to de-camp. The de rigueur troublemaker shot at a trucker, and another person caused a crash. Hence, media can now do its usual, personifying the protestors as violent or seditious.

Allott says, at 2.4: "The purpose of this book is to help human beings to know themselves better [Socrates: "Know thyself'] by offering a coherent model of what it is to be human." Thank you, Professor!

I have already mentioned, in Part 1, that Eutopia has not got much nitty-gritty material in its 368 pages. Allott does not tell you to sue the FDA, or circulate articles of impeachment, or devolve from a federal governing system to a state or provincial one. No, he has a bigger plan for you to carry out. He says, at 2.2: "Our response [to the 21st century crisis] will determine the future of the human species and even its survival."

You need to do whatever needs to be done. Is that too big a burden? Well, in my opinion. you caused the problem. You (and I) have let terrible stuff keep on happening for decades, never calling the wicked ones to account. Do pardon me for bringing up this old joke:

Customer goes to his Greek tailor with ripped trousers. He puts them on the counter. He says to the tailor "Eumenides?" The tailor asks "Euripides?" The man nods. The tailor pushes the trousers back to the customer with a disdainful look and says "Euripides, Eumenides."

What Is the Reality of Today's Pandemic?

To report that a truckers' convoy has come to Ottawa to force the government to lift the mandates, and that the prime minister is refusing, would be like painting only a detail of a large painting. There is so much more going on than a clash on the street.

What is going on, as citizens can see if they'd spend a half hour reading about it, is that some powerful people created a disease (real or imaginary) with a long-planned goal of mandating a vaccine passport. The injection itself is meant to kill and injure millions of people, and the passport is scheduled to become a digitalization of your activities.

This is a change to human living that outdoes any previous change in history. It reduces the human being to an idiot. I hope this sort of information about the harmful vaccine -- which hundreds of doctors have now shared on the Internet -- can become the focus of the Canadian and Australian protests.

Don't be shy to say that it an extreme event. You should not try to fit it into normal procedure of citizen versus politician. You should try to interpret the next move (if Ottawa really does get violent) as a small detail in the large painting. The media will be ready to oppose you if you go the small-detail route. If you go big painting, they will not have replies ready.

In Philip Allott's words, from Paragraph 2.46 of Eutopia:

"We have grounds for grave concern and grounds for great hope. The human race has an unprecedented power to deal with unprecedented challenges -- challenges of its own making."

In my words:

Don't lose this precious moment. Yesterday in Australia, Canberra police (or ADF soldiers, I'm not sure which), pepper-sprayed, close up, little children at the Parliament House peaceful protest. This does not mean it was a one-off overreach, which will eventually settle down.

No. It means that the Public Power has lost all sense of its limitations and that much worse things are bound to happen soon. Perhaps some B-52s will appear in the sky over Sydney, and actual bombs will drop on your home. Perhaps the 5G towers will be adapted to radiate you to death.

Nothing should be ruled out. This is war. Talk to your friends about Allott's fantastic insight into what we've been doing all these centuries and what we must do now. Go creative! Turn your imagination on!

And remember: Euripides, Eumenides.