"Insurrection" and the Language of Power

"Insurrection," "sedition" and like terms are the language of power demanding obedience. Emergencies Inquiry documents show how this language has penetrated the official mind. [1,000 words, 5 minutes]

The language of law and order has been appropriated by the left: January 6 demonstrators, Canadian truckers, and Dutch farmers are called insurrectionists, terrorists, extremists, seditionists, and traitors. The epithets fly, not merely on Twitter, but (admittedly a minor difference) in the mainstream media too. Where the naïve might expect to find factual description, we are told of insurrections and extremism.

Documents published by the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry into the Freedom Convoy and the Emergencies Act show that the language of insurrection was well established in the official mind prior to the arrival of the protesters in Ottawa. As I wrote recently, a prefabricated narrative existed, and it determined subsequent government messaging and policy (the two are sometimes hard to distinguish).

The language of loyalty and disloyalty, and the associated argot of insurrection and sedition, is the language of power. It is necessarily the language of those who possess power, and who expect to retain it. It was once the language of kings and lord chancellors, more recently of senators and segregationists. The language of “insurrection” and “sedition” is the language of power demanding obedience, and threatening disobedience. It is a language now spoken fluently on the left.

Not long ago, during the BLM riots of 2020, the left was celebrating what they called an uprising and sometimes an insurgency: echoes of the Viet Cong, heroic fighters for the popular cause (a distinctly mangled understanding of the Viet Cong, but it is their misunderstanding). A district of Seattle was occupied by the armed left; signs went up declaring that visitors were leaving the United States. GoFundMe promoted a fundraiser. The newspapers said that this was mostly peaceful.

The left has long seen itself as a rebel against unjust authority. The Partisan Review, The Jacobin, Dissent, Rabble.ca: these are the journals of the activist left. “Question Authority,” said the T-shirts, as did professors preaching from positions of authority. Che Guevara, an official of Castro’s tyranny, adorned the walls of dorm rooms. Transgression was fetishized; any self-respecting peer-reviewed article had to transgress a few boundaries, with extra points for a quotation from Georges Bataille. Antifa still tells us that “All Cops are Bastards.” The reflex has been long practiced, and puts the left into some novel if contradictory positions.

But so soon after celebrating actually deadly riots, in which dozens died, the left found itself in political power in the United States, as it is here in Canada, and in other countries of the English-speaking world. The left had long captured educational institutions, many churches, and most bureaucracies. Its capture of the security state, already penetrated by the “resistance” to Trump, was not far behind. The George Floyd riots completed the leftist capture of police departments.

The January 6 riot was the ideal pretext: violence surrounding the transfer of power was easily turned into an “insurrection” by a press compliant with institutional power. The I-word was ridiculous: an insurrection is an armed rebellion against state authority. The January 6 riot was deplorable (if one can still use the term unironically), but the rioters were not armed, and it was not a rebellion against the state, and had no leaders and no plan. The fellow with the horns was not Robert E. Lee; the gawking mob of tourists not the Army of Northern Virginia. The “insurrectionists” penetrated the Capitol, and wandered around taking selfies. The only person killed by violence was Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed woman shot by a panicked policeman, but that has not stopped a servile media from writing about the deadly “insurrection.”

The state, the police, and the media are today on the same side, and the legally loaded label of “insurrection” offered the opportunity to turn the full force of the security state on the supporters of President Trump. In the name of democracy, they round up their political opponents.

The legend took hold, and the specter of insurrection has proven useful. Here in Canada, documents made public by the Public Order Emergencies Inquiry show that government officials had internalized the understanding of January 6 as an insurrection, and with it the necessary consequence that dangerous insurrectionists were out there, even prior to the arrival of the truckers in Ottawa.¹

As the screen-shotted text makes clear, the “growing narrative” was not created by the political operators. It already existed, and was a standard part of government talking points about “our democracy.” The LRB here is not the London Review of Books, but rather the Liberal Research Bureau, the Liberal Party’s opposition research arm, which obviously needed no briefing. And this “growing narrative” was well-fertilized by the media which (as other released documents make clear) was acting as an arm of the state. The point is not that these cliches are false, but that they are established as true. They are the mental furniture of the official mind, available and taken seriously.

The language of order is now spoken by left, and the demand for obedience implicit in the language of insurrection and sedition is now wielded as a weapon against the citizenry. This language is a recent acquisition, its novelty speaking of the speed and direction of ideological change. The confidence with which the left speaks this language testifies to a confidence in the stability of its power. Given the hegemony of the left, which to say its control of the means of discourse (that has existed for some time), and also its hold on the institutions of state power, among them the legal profession, the judiciary, and the elected levels of government, that thoughtless arrogance is, alas, justified.

The experience of the Emergencies Act in this country, like the dragnet sweeping up even peaceful January 6 protestors in the United States, demonstrates that the left’s hold on the language of power has become a direct threat to our civil liberties.

1. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/exhibits/SSM.CAN.00007722_REL.0001.pdf

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