Pubdate: Tue, 06 Sep 2005
Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB)
Copyright: 2005 Calgary Herald
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/calgary/calgaryherald/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66
Author: Andrea Mrozek
Note: Andrea Mrozek is associate editor at the Western Standard.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?196 (Emery, Marc)

IT'S NOT ABOUT LIBERTY, JUST POT

Who would compare Martin Luther King and Marc Emery? What about Marc
Emery and Nelson Mandela?

Marc Emery would, that's who. His is a struggle of epic proportions,
to free the hundreds of thousands suffering from inhibited marijuana
plant use.

He's like Gandhi -- another self-comparison made in a recent interview
with the Western Standard magazine.

And the self-aggrandizing historical delusions don't stop there. A
statement now notorious, he wrote in his jailhouse blog: "I thought
the term Jewish-Nazi, or Nazi-Jew, was an oxymoron until Cotler became
the injustice minister." Now, it seems, he is Dietrich Bonhoeffer to
Irwin Cotler's Nazism.

Emery was not particularly famous prior to his Cotler slur.

But he was never just a marijuana activist. While he certainly is no
Mandela, he was always well-known to Canadians who call themselves
libertarian. Libertarianism is a philosophic outlook that values
individual freedom implicitly, and desires to diminish and limit state
control.

To some, Emery was not "the Prince of Pot," but a hero fighting
against government infringement in our lives. Drinking? That's legal.
Smoking cigarettes? Legal. But pot -- that's not.

Libertarian Canadians always had a valid point: What is legal is not
necessarily moral, and vice versa. To them, it appeared Emery was a
champion of that view.

Emery also calls himself a libertarian. "I am a capitalist and an Ayn
Rand acolyte. She has been the most influential philosopher in my
whole life," he says.

But now, instead of emphasizing his battle for liberty, he seems to
emphasize how his rights as a marijuana user have been maligned. He
speaks of "his people" as if marijuana were a banner uniting those in
the rainforests of South America with cafes in Vancouver. The
exaggeration he uses to advance his cause is destroying it.

For libertarians, ending state infringement on individual rights was
the primary cause. Now for Emery, it seems that broader picture has
been lost. He has played the system he holds in disdain to his
advantage -- paying taxes over years to the Canadian government. If
the system is truly immoral and corrupt, then there is nothing
particularly heroic in paying taxes to it.

Emery presents himself as the David to the Goliath of the United
States Drug Enforcement Agency. But in Canada, he has been complicit
- -- happy to have the Canadian authorities turn a blind eye to his
breaking the law.

It's no longer clear how Emery thought he was changing the world:
choosing to live in a province where marijuana offences are rarely
prosecuted, earning millions off his seed sales. It's clear he wanted
to change the marijuana laws; it's also clear he certainly profited
from the lack of Canadian enforcement, whether he kept the money or
not. He speaks so highly of marijuana that only the most dedicated
pothead could possibly relate.

"Marijuana," says Emery, "is a God-given sacrament put here for God's
children by the Creator himself and no government should undermine
that."

Pot may well be benign, like a glass of wine after work, but no one
tries to claim that drinking wine constitutes a right, or that grapes
are placed on this Earth for spiritual elevation.

Canadians need heroes: even people who are willing to break immoral
laws. "To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your
capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering . .
. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because non
co-operation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is
co-operation with good."

But those are not the noble words of Emery. That's Martin Luther King,
to remind us of a truly epic struggle.

In calling American prisons gulags, survivors of real dictatorships
are right to question the veracity of anything Emery says. Emery
leaves us not with noble inspiration, but with his rage against a
liberal Canadian justice minister and the U.S.

For freedom from state oppression, many who don't care for pot were
happy to support Emery. For the recognition that pot is not an
absolute evil, many who enjoy smoking it from time to time also
supported Emery.

But with the severe loss of integrity that comes with calling a
justice minister who happens to be Jewish a "Nazi-Jew" -- it just got
a lot harder for either camp to support Emery's cause.

It's not really clear when Emery started to fight for marijuana
instead of liberty. Maybe it's about the same point that he began
comparing himself to some of the world's greatest freedom fighters.
For them, it was about freedom. For Emery, the cause of liberty seems
to have gone to pot.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin