Dr. Richard Schabas

In the book Ordinary Men, about the Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, we learn that these reasonably normal-seeming citizens were responsible for mass shootings and also the round-ups of Jews for deportation to death camps. Oddly, they were not fanatical Nazis and the psychology behind their motives has been studied and picked over for years

Author Richard Browning makes the case that these middle-aged men who committed depraved and dehumanizing atrocities were driven by a mixture of motives:

… group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.

I thought about these men during the darkest days of Covid-19 authoritarianism and how quickly friends and neighbours succumbed to manufactured fear, driven by public health propaganda and media talking points. In a Netflix documentary about the RBU 101 unit, one of the German psychologists who studied the case asserts that the men were easily lead — because they were following edicts from the government.

He was making the point that a political leader’s statements can heavily influence the behaviour of the citizens who receive it — even if those statements are anti-democratic, and even murderous. Extreme lockdowns and forced vaccinations exposed how easy it is to march a country right up to the precipice.

The evidence for efficacy was never there for either strategy but people lined up and accepted what Prime Minister Trudeau and a country of compliant premiers decided was best. The public health plans enabled cruelty and betrayal on a scale not seen since the round-ups of Japanese Canadians during the World War II. Neighbour-on-neighbour snitching, police raids of Thanksgiving dinners, forced vaccination of children and the pointless and devastating closing of schools. I now fully understand how countries pass the tipping point down into full capture and totalitarianism.

I spent a week recently in Alberta and Saskatchewan on the Convoy documentary, contemplating Trudeau’s use of inflammatory commentary to impugn these citizen protestors before they even arrived. We will report on evidence that suggests a plan was hatched to destroy the reputation of the Convoy and anyone in political life who dared publicly support it. Fringe. Unacceptable. Nazi. Not to be Tolerated. The City of Ottawa, federal politicians and the mostly left-of-centre residents who vote Liberal, bought into it fully and reacted as if they were under siege on the Russian front. Honking and inconvenience morphed into a mass hysteria event.

Even after the ugliest and perhaps most violent takedown of a protest modern history, there are still nests of Convoy haters who justify it based on the lies of a carefully manufactured campaign. The angry, ordinary people who wish death and and prison on Tamara, Chris and the others are fuelled by the toxic rhetoric of our Prime Minister and his compliant media.

This is an extension of the hatred directed at anyone who questioned lockdowns, vaccines, masks and school closures. The skeptics were correct but paid a high price.

One of them was our guest this week. Dr. Richard Schabas, a former Ontario Medical Officer of health who was shunned by media and colleagues for making the same critiques many of us did. He stood up to speak truth to a captured country at a time when others were silent. Dr. Schabas is an ordinary man who wouldn’t play the dangerous authoritarian game of control that was ordered by our political and media class. As my friend Ann Bauer says — he is the friend who would take the risk and hide us in the attic.

So on this holy Christmas Eve, look for light out of darkness. It is there, now. It was there even at the heart of the notorious Reserve Police Battalion 101. Two thirds of the group took part, some enthusiastically and some reluctantly did what they were ordered to do. But the rest refused to take part.

We know who we are. We know what we would have done, fearlessly. Like Dr. Schabas.

May the peace of Christ be with you and all who fight for justice.

Jesus was a rebel.

Merry Christmas.

Trish…..