"Hate criminal needs deprogramming"
Dave Rutherford, Host
The Rutherford Show
Radio Station CHQR 770
Calgary, Alberta
Date: 26 March 2009
Dear Mr Rutherford,
Your guest in the 2nd hour [26Mar2009], Alan Young, is on the record as
favouring coercion to enforce conformity among those holding dissenting
views of history that he finds grossly insult his own understanding of
history. Copied below is a Toronto Star article in which Professor
Young delivers a volley of strident advocacy for coercive
deprogramming. Quote:
"For crimes of supreme stupidity we need Clockwork Orange justice --
strapping the hate criminal into a chair for an interminable period,
and keeping his eyes wide-open with metal clamps so he cannot escape
from an onslaught of cinematic imagery carefully designed to break his
neurotic attachment to self-induced intellectual impairment."
As you may recall, the kind of "Clockwork Orange justice" he advocates
was routinely employed by KGB officers in psychiatric wards in the
Soviet Union against dissidents of all stripes, including of course
Jewish refuseniks.
Sincerely yours,
Orest Slepokura
Strathmore, Alta
c. Alan Young
*****************************************************
Toronto Star | Toronto, March 28, 2004 | Alan Young
Hate criminal needs deprogramming
MANY afternoons while walking home from Hebrew day school, my best
friend and I would have rock fights with some of the local kids. Before
I even knew what anti-Semitism meant, our opponents would be throwing
rocks while screaming anti-Jewish slogans. It was all very biblical.
At the ripe age of six or seven we had no clue that our battles had
deeper, more sinister implications. We were just playing a version of
cops and robbers, with the Jews always cast in the role of robber. The
rock throwing was fun, but we never seemed to have any clever names or
slogans to throw back at our opponents. Our rocks were simply
accompanied by ethnically neutral slurs like dirty, smelly and stupid.
Turns out we were partly right.
Toronto has descended into the ugly world of hate and bigotry with a
recent flurry of anti-Semitic vandalism and graveyard desecration. The
police, the politicians and the media commentators have been describing
these Jew-hating criminals as cowardly, evil, low-life and cruel, but I
think their descriptions miss the mark.
The hate criminal is unique. The defining feature of the hate criminal
is stupidity. It is a crime born of intellectual deficiency. Anyone who
resorts to generalizations about the moral worth of every member of a
particular ethnic, racial or religious group is an imbecile. These
people turn off theirbrains and pay homage to half-baked philosophies
based on nothing more than their own inadequacies and insecurities.
The racist deliberately short-circuits his brain to massage a crippling
andneurotic need to hate. They really hate themselves but they project
the hatred on to historically well-recognized scapegoats. The
psychological solace gained by projecting hatred outward comes at a
great price -- the destruction of the gift of rationality.
Hitler was not an evil genius: he was stupid. If his neurotic hatred of
the Jewish people did not consume his rationality he might have won his
quest for European domination.
William Pierce, founder of the white supremacist group the National
Alliance, may have been a physics professor, but being able to
understand the splitting of the atom does not necessarily mean that the
genius understands the visible world.
Once it is understood that the defining feature of bigotry of any sort
is stupidity, then the administration of criminal justice faces real
problems.
In response to the recent wave of anti-Semitic vandalism, the Attorney
General of Ontario has pledged rigorous enforcement of the law. But
criminal justice actually can do very little to combat stupidity. In
assessing the constitutionality of our hate literature law in 1990, the
Supreme Court of Canada struggled with the knowledge that pre-Nazi
Germany also had hate literature crimes. We know that law can rarely
change the way a person thinks, especially when thinking is all mixed
up with delusion, and in trying to use the law as a tool of coercive
persuasion there is always the danger we will elevate the stupid into
the role of martyr for other stupid people. Although criminal justice
is an ineffective response, we still need the symbolic denunciation of
this hurtful irrationality of bigotry by invoking the criminal law.
When we prosecute those responsible for the recent vandalism, it would
be a mistake to think that a fine or imprisonment can address the
problem of hate-driven criminality. The hate criminal probably needs
rigorous deprogramming like the extreme measures taken by parents to
counter the brainwashing of children by lunatic cults. It is bizarre
that criminal justice officials try to do more to change the belief and
behaviour of johns charged with prostitution than they do with the
Ernst Zundels (left) and Jim Keegstras of the world. We send the
consumers of prostitution to "john school." We send the bigot to jail
to sit and stew, and the suffering is just used by the bigot to
reinforce the righteousness of delusional views.
Just as some cancers require invasive surgery, the hate crime needs
intrusive measures. The usual out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to
modern punishment just won't work in this case. For crimes of supreme
stupidity we need Clockwork Orange justice -- strapping the hate
criminal into a chair for an interminable period, and keeping his eyes
wide-open with metal clamps so he cannot escape from an onslaught of
cinematic imagery carefully designed to break his neurotic attachment
to self-induced intellectual impairment.
In the context of hate crime, I do have some regrets that we have a
constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. I don't
think coercive persuasion or deprogramming is necessarily cruel, but as
a state sanction it is unusual. However, if the crime is unique the
sanction should be also. Simply dishing out more prison time or a
larger fine is a dead-end. We need a punishment that can kick-start a
brain.
Regrettably when it comes to punishment, our system rarely exhibits
ingenuity, audacity and courage.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alan Young is a law professor, criminal lawyer and author of Justice
Defiled: Perverts, Potheads, Serial Killers & Lawyers (Key
Porter).