Institutions of higher learning in British Columbia have come up with an idiotic and criminal idea to end all idiotic and criminal ideas.
University and college employees, teaching staffs in particular, are now obligated to attend several hours of anti-bullying courses. They will be taught about all kinds of bullying, how they differ in various environments, and whatnot. Following that, they will be required to sit for examinations to establish whether they understood and accepted truisms such as “bullying is bad.”
So far, so bad.
But there’s worse to come.
If they refuse, they’re going to be ordered to appear before their human resources chiefs. More often than not, the verdict will be simple: find yourself a new job. And don’t expect us to give you good references for your potentially new employers to judge you upon.
And there’s even worse to come.
Human resources departments will receive the results of the examinations mentioned above. They will be basing their evaluation of their employees on these results.
Socialist systems such as communist, nazi and fascist, have been using this kind of coercion with varying degrees of success. They concentrated on ideology, to be sure, rather than on harassment and bullying, but the principle was the same: the courses were compulsory, and test results were filed with the appropriate human resources departments, or whatever they used to be called then.
It is perfectly appalling that anybody permits things like that to happen in a democratic country such as Canada.
These programs are run by specially trained people whose title says it all: they are called harassment officers.
These programs fit the definitions of harassment and bullying to the last details. Just consider: someone in power uses that power to order their subordinates to do things these subordinates detest, and the people in power say, right up-front, that whoever disobeys will face the firing squad, including putting them on an unofficial blacklist. As a result, most such employees keep their mouths shut. Jobs such as theirs are scarce, after all, and with a bad reference letter, what hope have they? None.
All this is illegal. Unconstitutional, even.
Yet, what we face is not a storm of protest. We face deadly silence.
A saying attributed to German pastor Martin Niemoeller says it all. After the Second World War, a major part of which Niemoeller spent behind bars in Hitler’s Third Empire (das Dritte Reich), he allegedly said that when the nazis came to pick the socialists, he was silent because he wasn’t a socialist, when they came for the Jews, he didn’t say a word because he wasn’t Jewish, and when they, eventually, came to grab him, there wasn’t anyone to speak up on his behalf.
Which is precisely where we’ll end up if we remain silent.
Absolutely, bullying is an ugly phenomenon. Crime, too. And so is harassment. But the irony of it all is that the anti-bullying and anti-harassment commissars are engaging in bullying and harassment of the worst kind, all in the name of progress.
Societies based on law have a few simple premises. Such as: you have to commit a crime before anyone has the right to accuse you, and never mind judge you. And you cannot be found guilty if there’s a smidgen of reasonable doubt casting its shadow upon your case.
Logically, this means that people who only refused to waste their time to hear stupid clichés but haven’t bullied and/or harassed anybody are innocent.
Those who bully and harass them like the anti-bullying and anti-harassment crowds do, they are the criminals here.
They should face the consequences.
And those who are thus bullied into submission should stand up and tell them where they can put their pet courses, mostly make-work projects for their friends, anyhow.
Stand up, Canada, and send those bullying quasi-human-rights harassers where they belong.
Questions, questions, questions ... 