A month or so ago, the government of Australia did something most unusual among us children of grand white Britain by apologizing to its aboriginal peoples for the abuses they have suffered.

Then the conservative leader of the opposition stood up to give his own racist semi-”apology” which basically that everyone had intended well and it’s a shame how it turned out to be genocidal and oops, and isn’t assimilation really a grand idea?

Here and elsewhere in Australia, the assembled crowds who’d come to listen to the announcement outside then responded by turning their backs on the speech:

Well done, people.

Voting turnout percentages have become a perennial problem in industrialized countries. In some places, they’re still pretty high – in Australia, for example, which enforces “compulsory voting” by making you sign in to a polling station and charging you a nominal fine if you don’t, turnout is still well above 90%. And in new democracies, strangely, they’re often pretty high too. About 70% of eligible voters turned up for those Ukrainian elections in 2006 that prompted all the hooplah and “Orange Revolution” protests. But the rest of us don’t vote much anymore – Canada tends to be around 60% these days, and the U.S. is frequently even lower.

Part of this is because the 18-25 age bracket simply has almost nobody voting, at least in Canada. Politics are pretty much irrelevant to most people my age: the aftermath of the countercultural backlash of the 1960s and 1970s has been more than successful in persuading them that all politicians and people in senior political and economic authority are hopelessly corrupt and that the institutions are beyond reform, or at least beyond easy reform, but the conclusion drawn from this seems to be that the political system just therefore has no value in their lives and isn’t worth taking the time to understand. This leads to what is commonly summarized as “apathy.” It also leads to Elections Canada making a bunch of stupid commercials during the election campaign, likening voting to improvised rap music.

The Canadian position appeared to reach new lows this year in the Albertan provincial elections, were just 41% of eligible voters came out to re-coronate the Conservatives. In a way, I can understand why someone who likes the Conservatives in Alberta wouldn’t bother to vote – since they’ve been in power for decades there and defeat at the polls seems extraordinarily unlikely – and even why someone who doesn’t like them wouldn’t bother to vote – for pretty much the same reason, as well as the fact that the antidemocratic first-past-the-post system means the Conservatives capture virtually all the seats despite having only about 50% of the popular vote.

The media has fretted and wrung its hands over the issue – see coverage by CBC and the Globe and Mail, for example – even though part of the problem is their editorial approach, in which smiling professional political “experts” tell listeners how the passive, docile “public” – that mass of emotional individuals which apparently is not supposed to include those actually reading or watching the pundit in question – is likely to react to the blatant efforts to manipulate them by politicians. To pundits, manipulation and deceit is an expected and even approved part of the political rough and tumble.

Still, the Church of the Orange Sky applauds them for wondering whether voting turnout is too low, though no one seems sure what to do about it. Into the silence and darkness the Church speaks the words of truth and light:

One way to help increase the voting rates might be to introduce compulsory voting, like the Australians did during the 1920s, in response to an election where the turnout was a shocking 60% (today, such numbers are taken as a matter of course in Canada, and even applauded as a high turnout in the U.S.). I suspect the idea of forcing people to perform civic duties might appeal to some conservatives, though libertarians would probably hit the roof, and this Church generally does not support such extensions of government authority, either. It might not even withstand a constitutional challenge, which would no doubt be launched one of a number of conservative foundations and endowments which would be worried about the prospect of several million young and poor people showing up at the polling booth and voting for the wrong elites, or even for people who aren’t elites at all.

One way most assuredly not to increase voting turnout is to limit voting by requiring people to have multiple government-issued photo ID documents on hand when showing up to vote, even if they’re already listed voters. This has the effect of disenfranchising large numbers of poor and particularly homeless people who don’t have such documents available. I know I don’t have such documents available, mainly because I’m a low-income student who will be moving again a few months and for a number of reasons haven’t bothered to update any of my government documents to reflect the address I currently live at. The original new law, introduced last year, was so poorly thought out that it also disenfranchised a large number of rural people who didn’t have standard residential mailing addresses; this was hastily corrected through new amendments.

Even in its present form, though, it introduces a profound ethical problem: is it right and just to vote as a citizen when other citizens are unable to exercise that same constitutional right? The Church has pondered whether it ought to encourage its members to abstain from voting in protest, to spoil their ballots in protest, or to attempt to disrupt the national electoral process in some other way in order to draw attention to the problem. The latter would doubtless be considered terrorism or some such, though this is not necessarily a legitimate counter-argument, and the Edible Ballot Society has been attracting the occasional headline for some years now

Nevertheless, influential right-wing conservatives within our ranks have currently limited the Church’s official position on the subject to merely urging members to vote only for those parties which have publicly protested the new law. Thus the Church may endorse only the New Democratic Party, since it is the only party with elected officials who actually protested the present laws of disenfranchisement.

In the meantime, laying aside this profound disenfranchisement, the Church has turned its attention to the question of increasing voting rates, and proposes as a partial solution to the problem that all people who present themselves at a polling station in order to vote be given $20 as compensation for doing so.

This would add as much as $500 million to the cost of holding the election (much less than that if 100% of voters don’t turn up to claim their reward, of course), but that’s not necessarily a problem. Bureaucratic overhead would be minimal and it’s basically sort of a reverse poll tax – a poll rebate, we’ll call it. Pay $20 in taxes, get $20 back at the polling booth. The government wastes money much more senselessly on a daily basis, with much less return for the electorate. We could even spend some of our current budget surplus on it.

Representatives of the Church have conducted scientific sampling of Canadian citizens and residents to solicit feedback on the subject, and have in doing so encountered a number of easily resolved objections. Some, for example, feel that a modest financial reward isn’t enough to convince people to come out and vote. Perhaps not, but this is an effort to encourage more voting, not to resolve the turnout problem entirely. People may still choose not to vote for any of a number of reasons. In the meantime, there are plenty of people in society who would vote simply because they could use an extra $20 in their food budget. Some might object to the scheme on these grounds, offering the mistaken bourgeois argument that one ought to always conduct civic duty selflessly and without prospect of reward. Not so! Corporate elites routinely manipulate the voting process with the prospect of financial reward, and much more than $20 per capita in financial reward, at that! And would people really prefer that people not vote at all than vote for the wrong reasons? Such a position is untenable given that legally we do not and cannot inquire into someone’s reasons or intentions at the polling booth. It’s not like the Church is paying people only to vote for a particular party, which I agree would be very wrong indeed.

Some conservatives may also worry that this proposal is part of a conspiracy by the Church of the Orange Sky to introduce various new schemes of wealth redistribution, since $20 means much more to certain classes of society than to others, and – in particular – much of the money for the poll rebate would actually be contributed by wealthier members of society. For example, a person with an annual income of $5000 might essentially get a free $20, having contributed nothing in taxes that year, while someone with an income of $200 000 would pay for the $20 poll rebates of not just themselves but many others.

Fair enough, but this is separate from the Church’s other systematic schemes of wealth redistribution, most of which go far beyond meagre payments to voters. Would such people argue that the protection of a small portion of their personal material wealth is more important than the maintenance of a healthy democratic civil society, especailly since their production of wealth is dependent on the rest of that civil society playing by the existing capitalist rules anyways? If worst comes to worst, we could always just yank $500 million from the military. They’d never be able to buy any more broken submarines if we did it on a regular basis, but maybe that’s for the best. This will no doubt be a controversial suggestion and the Church suggests other solutions be attempted instead. Its perspective on the Canadian military will be explored by another, separate proclamation.

Readers of Jesus Drives an SUV may already be familiar with the Church of the Orange Sky, which is a para-real Canadian religious organization which exists to proclaim the mysterious and terrible glory of the Orange Sky to a fallen world which has forgotten its way and no longer remembers the truth.

Jesus Drives an SUV is primarily a religious blog, however, which meant that despite its great support for that centre of revolutionary ferment, the Church required a new and official home to deliver its message, particularly on political subjects, and particularly ones that might get Jesus Drives an SUV into trouble for being too pro-terrorist, too anti-government, or some other nonsense that would upset the readership of an ostensibly apolitical blog, readers who presumably don’t go there to read about why banks in trouble should be nationalized. (Having said that, readers should be assured that the Church of the Orange Sky’s influence over secular worldly affairs is so great that, within mere hours of the publication of this pronouncement, the British government responded by nationalizing the bank in question.)

The impetus for this blog came with a somewhat dated story now from the National Post (otherwise known as the American Post by my queerly socialist first-year business professor, though technically it’s merely the Jewish-Manitoban Post, if we go by “ownership”) which tried to tell the story of Salman Hossain, a Muslim student radical in Toronto who wrote a number of provocative posts on Internet forums arguing that Jews made better targets than Americans, that Canadian involvement in the Afghan and Iraqi wars made us “legitimate targets,” and that “mass casualty” terrorist strikes here in the West will do more to end the imperialist war than will non-violent protests.

The Post didn’t like Hossain’s attitude and quoted a variety of “experts” on international terrorism, among whom the consensus seems to be that Hossain is an evil bastard who wants to kill people. Based on my own limited experiences as a graduate student in intelligence and espionage, as well as a graduate student at one of Canada’s bastions of conservative realist security doctrine, the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, I’ve encountered such “experts” before on occasion, and they live up to what I expected here.

Basically, there are the moderates and the extremists. The moderates, like Wesley Wark at U of T, admit the obvious – that Hossain is basically a harmless student looking for excitement, which in Wark’s terminology makes him a “ranter” – but warn that words might “tip over” into action, and therefore it’s time to pass new laws and make new crimes and punishments (Wark actually uses the term “reform” for this process, though most people associate reform with less intrusive authoritarian government, not more). Because part of his research funding has come from CSIS and the CSE, Wark sneaks in that new laws should overturn our current privacy protection and “ensure prompt and effective monitoring of potentially harmful Internet traffic.” This is a complete red herring because the police have evidently been able to identify Hossain even without the new police state powers Wark wants them to have.

Then there are the extremists, like Bruce Hoffman, who think that we don’t necessarily need new laws because the public inexplicably “owes” its soldiers moral support and we can’t afford to “demoralize” our soldiers. For this reaosn, Hoffman argues, we should arrest Hossain and charge him with terrorism, even though we know he hasn’t broken the law. Hoffman explains that this is because prosecutors need to “send a message” to radicals like Hossain to shut their evil little unpatriotic mouths, even if opening them is still legal thanks to some weird free-speech loophole in that goddamned Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

First off, this idolization of the soldier is lame. On the one hand we worship our warriors for their ability to slaughter the enemy, and on the other we fawn over their precious fragile emotional stability, worrying that we might “demoralize” them if we question whether or not they should be killing people in the first place.

More importantly, authoritarian twits like Hoffman are the reason the Canadian government is still, illegally and unconstitutionally, holding suspected “terrorists” at Kingston Pen, not only years after they were arrested without trial but also years after the Supreme Court of Canada ordered they could no longer be detained for this very reason. Stupid little medieval concepts like habeas corpus can’t be allowed to get in our way as we prosecute the terrorists, terrorism experts agree!

It’s funny how we have all these “terrorism experts” these days, isn’t it? It’s been an endemic problem in the developed world for decades now – we’ve had political, religious, and nationalist terrorist groups pretty much everywhere, even here in Canada once upon a time. (The FLQ’s agitation during the 1960s basically succeeded only in proving once again that “propaganda of the deed” doesn’t work, though it’s possible they indirectly contributed to the rise of the Parti Quebecois as a peaceful nationalist alternative.) It’s been there, hovering in the background, but it wasn’t really a true concern. Then, 9/11 happens, and all of a sudden the world of academic security studies is full of “terrorism experts” inexplicably qualified to offer practical advice to trigger-happy governments. One of the faster post-9/11 academic reflections to make it off the presses, an edited book called Worlds in Collision, actually had a chapter’s worth of advice on the question “Who may we bomb?”, the answer to which was basically “everybody.”

That’s because the primary purpose of security studies “scholars” is to provide a veneer of academic sobriety to the constant budget lobbying by the defence, surveillance, and foreign affairs bureaucracies, who would otherwise be left at the trough with only their pet corporate contractors for company.

Security activism isn’t new (it was behind a lot of the popular nationalist militarism leading up to World War I too, for example), but the current phase started in the late 1940s, when the carnage of the Second World War – and a few conveniently funded public think tanks – convinced North American and European politics that they could no longer afford to turn inwards and proclaim peace for all. It may surprise people to learn just how influential the peace movement became in some states during the interwar period. Various student unions at major universities, like Oxford, actually pledged never to join the military and prosecute a war ever again (promises which were mostly cast aside later on), and in 1928, the Kellogg-Briand treaty actually renounced war as an instrument of state policy. The pact was the result of a failed Polish proposal the previous year which was then taken up by the French and the Americans, though the Americans promptly sabotaged the new law by claiming that war for self-defensive purposes didn’t count as “war” under the treaty. You might think it’s therefore just a meaningless scrap of paper, but in those days the rule of law did sometimes mean something, and so the Pact was resurrected after World War II (however briefly) to provide a legitimate legal basis for prosecuting leading Nazis as war criminals. Back then, you see, they didn’t just cram people into Guantanamo on some flimsy pretext.

Anyhow, one of the lessons of the war was that countries ought to have aggressive foreign policies. Networks of think tanks sprang up to help Western governments figure out how to spend the flood of peacetime military dollars which could no longer go just to resupplying units exhausted by actual warfighting. Some of these think tanks were literally just cover organizations for the military – the “RAND Corporation,” today a leading conservative think tank, was actually spun off by the U.S. Air Force in the 1950s, and its name is a peppy acronym for its original role as, literally, the “Research ANd Development Corporation” for the USAF.

Pretty soon Europe was thoroughly re-militarized, though once in a while tensions would rise again, as they did during the 1970s and 1980s when the Americans and Soviets occasionally sent new nuclear weapons into the field to try and make the other side nervous. For the most part, though, the superpowers pretty much preferred the status quo in Europe. During the 1980s, even while Ronald Reagan was denouncing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” the State Department and the CIA were quietly considering whether to help the Soviets shore up their ailing dictatorship in Poland, where pro-democracy dissidents were threatening to topple the communist dictatorship and thus overturn Europe’s delicate “strategic balance.”

The real battle, though, was in the Third World, where not only were there all sorts of newly “postcolonial” states eligible for recolonization, but there were plenty of opportunities to actually use our new weapons. Nuclear weapons are worth a lot of money, but at the end of the day they’re still sitting in their siloes.

That doesn’t mean you can’t make extra money on nukes anyways – for about twenty years the American army, air force and navy fought a running battle over who deserved which nuclear weapons and where, the result being that everyone got extra helpings of nukes and their own share in a ludicrously exaggerated war plan calling for a total of one-hundred and four nuclear bombs to be dropped on metropolitan Moscow alone.

But the real money is always in real war, and that can only be fought in the Third World, where the enemies don’t have nuclear weapons and can’t effectively resist us. Sure, they can fight insurgencies, which actually succeed with surprising regularity – the U.S. lost in Vietnam, and we’re currently losing in both Iraq and Afghanistan – but the convenient thing about fighting poor people is that they’re nowhere near the sort of threat to us that we are to them. Sometimes our soldiers die, but when we decide to invade Afghanistan, we don’t have to seriously consider what might happen to Canada as a result. It’s basically like investing in stocks – hopefully you gain, but at worst, you only lose the men and material you ship over there, wherever “there” happens to be in any given conflict.

The fact that these are basically powerless enemies, however, requires that we contrive a variety of different rationales for killing them, and this is where the security studies experts come in: they help us realize (1) why Others are so irredeemably dangerous and evil that they need to be imprisoned and, if necessary, killed; and (2) why the Others can be aggressive threats even when it is we who invade their countries, we who set up repressive dictatorships who then become the symbols of “secular modernity” to student dissidents in those countries, and we who fund and train the brutal and radical military movements in those countries when their governments turn against us.

Reason No. 2 isn’t without problems, since it requires us to regularly adjust our definitions. The latter, for example, is why various terrorist groups in Iran have become friendly “non-terrorists” in the eyes of the State Department, even while the Iranian armed forces has been defined as a terrorist organization by the same department, a blatant violation of their own definition of terrorists as non-state actors, which itself is a conveniently elitist workaround intended to prevent the inevitable comparisons of evil “terrorism” to Western governments’ strategic bombing of German cities, plans for strategic bombing of Soviet cities, innumerable air raids and interdictions and “blockades” of offending countries like Cuba and Nicaragua, etc., etc.

Reason No. 1, though, is an even bigger problem, because these “enemies of democracy” don’t usually look much alike. The Third World man is a sort blank slate of evil, onto which we can project communist radicalism (during the 1980s), violent ethnic nationalism (during the 1990s), or anti-democratic terrorism (during the 2000s). Fortunately for us, in security studies they normally don’t have many English-speaking representatives capable of speaking on their behalf, so very few people ask why Stalinist North Korea, secular Sunni Iraq, and religious revolutionary Shi’ite Iran belong in the same “axis of evil,” or how they managed to form such close friendships after we spent so many billions of dollars helping the Iranians and Iraqis kill each other during the 1980s.

One of the true ironies is that yesterday’s enemies always become less sinister in a twisted sort of nostalgia. We pretty much forgot all about Nazism and Japanese militarism pretty quickly after World War II, and the Americans even hired large numbers of Nazis as scientists, spies, and – of relevance here! – security analysts, in order to jump-start the new Cold War against the evil “communists,” who were inexplicably even more dangerous than the evil “fascists.” Then we were fighting the Muslim radicals and ethnic nationalists and rogue states and other chaotic elements, who for some reason are even more dangerous than the Soviets, despite the fact they don’t have nuclear weapons capable of eradicating almost all human life, because they are irrational, insane, “rogues,” etc.

In contrast to these silent but dangerous others, security scholars can speak on every subject at any time. Thus Barry Posen, who wrote about the future evils of ethnic war during the early 1990s, spent the years after 9/11 reflecting on the need for a “grand strategy” against terrorism. Some such scholars, recognizing how worthless democracy really is in the elitist game of global politics, write in the pages of arch-conservative international relations journals, like International Security and SAIS Review, that we actually need more dictatorships in the world, so that they can effectively administer capital punishments to the terrorists without having to bother with civilized niceties like fair trials and independent juries.

From what I’ve been writing here, you might think that being a security scholar means being hypocritical, elitist, and authoritarian. That’s probably unfair – there are lots of “critical” scholars who aren’t, though they tend to isolate themselves through liberal use of six-syllable words. However, there’s also bright sides of being part of the mainstream. For one thing, there’s often more money available in research grants of one sort or another.

More importantly, it can be a very liberating experience. Here’s why: when you’re a twenty-year-old student radical, saying that Canadian soldiers are legitimate targets during wartime, that killing them might help end the war, and that our governments have no business involved in an imperial war against people who aren’t really our enemy is “demoralizing,” evil, and might land you in jail.

By contrast, when you’re a forty-year-old terrorism “expert,” you can call for the overthrow of foreign governments, the ensuing slaughter of tens or or even hundreds of thousands of civilians, and subsequent repression of the survivors by autocracies and dictatorships, and we call this “important policy-relevant debate.” Even when you are thought to side with “the enemy,” it usually takes a few years to build a case just strong enough to get you fired, as happened with Ward Churchill in the years after 9/11.

The lesson for Mr. Hossain, therefore is this: if you want to be a pro-war polemical jackass, wait until you’re a professor, and make sure you’re advocating killing the right people. That way you can cheerfully advocate massacres right and left, but instead of having the RCMP arrest you, instead you can have the Department of National Defence pay you for your important work!