Demonstrating to readers that the academy is as big a joke as the Globe & Mail, Andrew Cohn—a professor at Carleton University—recently parroted hyperbolic statist talking points lifted from the American political establishment, at least those on the January 6 committee: that the peaceful Freedom Convoy protests are insurrectionist, terroristic, and so forth. These protests against soft-totalitarian encroachment, medical tyranny, mass surveillance, jab apartheid, and the violation of basic Charter rights and freedoms, are unprecedented, granted that the situation we find ourselves in (distinguished and made especially surreal by lockdowns and coercive jabs) is itself unprecedented in Canada. However, Cohn thinks this reminiscent of the FLQ crisis, where leftist-separatist terrorists from Quebec began kidnapping politicians, prompting Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, which limited civil liberties and granted the police far-reaching powers. The parallels Cohn forces are offered as a means to justify force.
Cohn's apparent detachment—social and mental—are on full display in this article entitled, "The Ottawa occupation is the October Crisis revisited. Justin Trudeau must be bold". While Cohn admits, "The Freedom Convoy is not the FLQ....Justin Trudeau is not Pierre Trudeau," he doesn't mind conflating the former two if that means that the state can silence this protest and its central message, which the elites don't want heard. Furthermore, and even more interestingly, he later compares the protests to the occupation of Paris in 1871 by French leftists who went about butchering priests and those believed antipathetic to their cause. How was that resolved, you might ask? The army went in and rightly put them down like dogs.
It's understandable why Trudeau's father had to crush the Front de liberation du Quebec as the French army had the Communards. After all, the FLQ had kidnapped the provincial Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross from his Montreal residence. They were violent and terroristic, much like other leftist terror movements in the 1960s and 1970s, employing tactics some of which were appropriated by Woke Capital's favorite revolutionaries in 2020.
Over the past three weeks in Canada, no one has been kidnapped or murdered by persons associated with the Freedom Convoy. That said, there was an ISIS-style attempt made on the protesters by a leftist alleged pedophile. In fact, it seems as though it is only the counter protesters that have been getting violent (predominantly out in Vancouver). Nevertheless, Cohn—because he is also detached from reality—regards this particular instance of free expression and protest anathematic to polite society.
"Democracy is under siege" he says, discounting the fact that the provincial and federal regimes have not openly debated the arbitrary restrictions they have imposed on the public; that it was not from outside that Parliament was besieged, but from within.
So why again make the comparison, when the Freedom Convoy shares so little in common with the Paris Commune or the FLQ? It's the ends Cohn and the Ottawa establishment are interested in. They speak of democracy but despise the demos. Cohn's article serves one purpose besides revealing the uselessness of sending your children to Carleton University: to make an excuse for statist violence against the Canadian people. "If facing them down means mobilizing the military...[Trudeau] should do it."
If Cohn's searching for historical parallels to justify the state's naked use of force to kill a peaceful movement, next time he should be more honest with himself and with his readers.
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