One year ago, FORCES Canada was formed to fight prohibition. Of course, many people disagreed that tobacco control was really prohibition. It was billed as something more like: "protecting the health of non-smokers." Today, while this perception still exists in the minds of the die-hard believers in the honesty of the various Departments and Ministries of Health, more and more people begin to see that the health nazis are on their way to capture and remodel our way of life.
This remodelling, of course, does not concern just tobacco. The great social experiment of having doctors and health industry associations dictate our behaviour is just a gearing up for more and more control.
If this trend continues to its logical conclusions, groups like the Canadian/American Cancer Society, or the local Medical Association will have more influence on the legislator than political parties, and citizen constituencies.
Indeed, these groups will have more political power than the legislator and the government itself, due to their ability to shape public opinion through their main accomplices: the media, secured long ago through infiltration, and the offering of guaranteed-to-make-sensation news.
The dissenting citizen finds himself lost in a sunami of propaganda and restrictive legislation, and he can be excused for concluding that opposing the flow has the same chance as fighting a hurricane in Florida. Though the fine strategy of projecting an impression of overwhelming consensus and force is not new, for it was mastered by Goebbles in Nazi Germany, the new twist is the '90s emphasis on
creating the impression that independent science has reached conclusions justifying the behaviour of the legislators and regulators.
Once the impression of consensus is created, the dissenting citizen then finds that he is ignored by media, his own political representatives, and the authorities, as well as being subject to peer pressure. This scheme's objective is to induce the citizen to think that he is wrong, and his position indefensible. It is therefore necessary to join the "majority". As soon as this is done, social acceptance is restored, and the good feeling of stress relief is associated with the concept of being "on the right side", so that life can go back to "normal". This newly "educated" citizen in turn "voluntarily" becomes part of the peer pressure on other dissenting citizens, and so on.
The approach of inducing people against people with the complicity of media and junk science is extremely effective. Long gone are the days when the "objectors" were receiving police visits in the old dictatorial regimes. The New Soviets have found immensely more sophisticated ways to achieve more impressive results.
In a way, these politics are reminiscent of an old science fiction movie, "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers", where aliens were absorbing the bodies of humans, and shortly created a society where the still human, dissenting being was chased, isolated, and transformed into a conforming, peaceful, controlled, and very healthy being. Science fiction as political metaphor.
It is imperative that people who still believe that values of "health" should not replace essential moral values of individual free choice and behaviour act now. They must become activists -- and abandon any attempt to negotiate their way through this prohibitionistic hurricane by convincing themselves that "They" won't dare tramp too hard on rights and freedoms. Any attempt to settle with the prohibitionists -- other than acceptance of their position -- has been proven useless.
Only actions turned to the destruction of this politicized "health" scheme can restore the moral foundations of this country.
This is why FORCES Canada has changed its Statement of Purpose.
Smokers are not alone. Nor are drinkers, or the consumers of politically-incorrect amounts of fat. Nor are the other potential targets of life-style and behaviour control campaigns. There are millions and millions of people who have a stake in preserving free choice. They just have to become more aware of their importance, and of their right to choose their way of life. The fact that a few once reputable health groups have become corrupted by their desire for money and political control cannot force hundred of millions of people to conform.
The new health police cannot make us conform. Unless we let them. Will we?
To paraphrase a well-known slogan of one power-thirsty health group, "If you can't choose, nothing else matters".
Gian Turci,
President
