Principles of Dialogue

by Matthew Cockle, Gail Y. Davidson

The following document was created to support emerging discussions, as more and more of our family members, friends, and colleagues begin to question the narrative imposed by our governments, media, courts and public institutions over the last three years, and to provide guidance as we
engage in human rights advocacy that insists on truth and opposes injustice.

Promoting Productive and Respectful Informed Debate

What has become clear over the last three years is that we are in the struggle of our lives against state sponsored actions to destroy community, abolish rights and impose authoritarian control.

People in positions of power have used words to create fear, compel obedience, instill hatred and justify abuse. They label critics as deserving of punishment, they criminalize dissent, and they impose severe penalties upon those who continue to protest—as though the severity of such unlawful punishment might somehow justify their violating law, essential rights, and democratic processes.

Canada’s Prime Minister refused conversation with the truckers and other Canadians who gathered in Ottawa to protest the infringement of their rights and freedoms by the COVID-19 mandates. He prohibited the parliamentary and public debate necessary to democratic governance. In addressing Canadians about COVID mandates, he relied almost entirely on marketing slogans—such as “safe and effective”—to compel acceptance and he employed divisive labels—such as “fringe minority”—to dismiss those who questioned or criticized the mandates.

Canada’s Prime Minister encouraged defamation over dialogue, and division over debate.  He used words to polarize people and invalidate issues of concern falsely labelling those who opposed his policies.

A small fringe minority with unacceptable views, posing a threat to Canadians, lashing out at science at government, at society at mandate and public health advice, championing “hate, abuse and racism” people who hurl abuse at small business workers …steal food from the homeless…fly racist flags. – Prime Minister Trudeau

In speaking this way, he created divisions and fostered a culture of disrespect that prevented conversation and impaired collective problem solving. Throughout the declared pandemic, the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and their cabinet continued to foster ever wider and socially destructive divisions that justified abuse of the non-compliant.

These actions and intentional efforts to divide, marginalize, discriminate, and abuse need to be called out and exposed, and those responsible need to be held to account.

But what about those rights advocates who also use words to discriminate, marginalize and invite abuse of others even while thinking they are doing the right thing. How do we catch ourselves when our outrage leads us astray?

Human Rights Advocates Must Lead By Example

.We certainly don’t want to emulate the behaviour of Trudeau and other officials who use language to divide, marginalize, discriminate and justify abuse. Instead, we seek to oppose such tyrannical  tactics by promoting respect and love for one another in our efforts to engage in productive dialogue and to protect the rights and freedoms of all. To that end we need to use words as the tools to access and distribute information, to facilitate education and to engage in exemplary civil debate about issues of concern. Our goal is to help more and more people begin to educate themselves and others while building and restoring community.

If we want to foster a more civilized society where differences are not only respected, but valued because they make us all better, then we need to start by helping create an environment conducive to both education and mutual aid. To this end, we must lead by example so that the way we speak, the way we engage, helps promote informed debate. In growing strong communities, we need to get people talking productively, identifying solutions together, and then engaging in collective efforts to effect the changes needed. To achieve anything approaching balanced sanity and collective critical thinking will require a great deal of cooperation and unrelenting resistance. But it will also require the fostering—largely through language—of a culture that valorizes responsibility, respect, and accountability.

When the goal is a culture that upholds rights, responsibility, respect, and accountability, then the means we employ to achieve the change we want, have to exemplify responsibility, respect, and accountability—our means and ends must be aligned. And this leads us to a number of essential questions:

  •   How do we advocate for our rights and freedoms without trampling rights of others and without inviting abuse of others? 
  •   How do we advocate for our rights and freedoms, without using labels and language that expose others to harm and diminish the reliability and integrity of our conclusions and opinions?
  •   How do we ensure that the Freedom Movement is free of divisive labeling, name calling and abuse so that we maximize success, minimize divisiveness and prevent abuse of others?

·   How do we become a society where differences are not only respected, but valued because they make us all better?

Being Careful With Words

For those engaged in advocacy work, it is imperative that we exercise caution and effective precision in the language we use. Not because Canadians are supposed to be polite. Not in order to be politically correct. No, people don’t necessarily need to be calm or polite—though it might make things easier much of the time.

It is essential to remember, however, that What we would suggest is that we do not want to add to the current culture of abuse. On the contrary, we want to find ways to unite communities rather than divide them. 

So, how can we engage in impassioned activism–activism that involves appropriate and often productive outrage and righteous anger without trampling the rights and freedoms of others and without becoming the unwitting tools of our oppressors?

This is a difficult problem. 

We are subjected to tactics involving violence, coercion, and control. But for us, in terms of the world we’re aiming to create, restore and maintain, we can’t make use of those tactics. We can’t employ violence and coercion; we can’t encourage discriminatory abuse—because that’s what we’re opposing. 

Human rights advocacy work supports personal and collective activism that unambiguously works to secure rights and freedoms for all, the defeat of tyranny, and the re-establishment of democracy.

Recognizing what’s been done to us and taken from us, can help us see more clearly what we have and what we value as a community. We can look at the way words have been used against us. And we can remember that total control depends in part on the use of words to break communities, compel obedience and turn people against one another.

The systems used against us employ propaganda, censorship and corrupted law making and enforcement that compel obedience, at the risk of losing essential rights to jobs, businesses, mobility, privacy, expression, association, personal autonomy and due process. While resisting this oppressive agenda, we don’t ever want to do their dirty work for them by creating further divisions that might facilitate oppressive campaigns against us or against any others.

The Art of Distraction

Use of fear has always been a way of exerting authoritarian control over populations. By inspiring fear, authorities can maximize acquiescence, minimize opposition and divert attention away from concerning actions by both state and non-state actors.

Related to this strategy is the fabrication of threats. Authorities can disorient a target population and focus outrage and concern on an endlessly varied array of concocted enemies. Such concocted enemies can be truckers and unvaxxed people, climate change deniers and oil industry workers, gay and trans people, or critics of war-profiteering and students protesting genocide. Divisive strategies for bringing about societal disintegration are bound to take their cues , at least in part, from trends in public opinion, but they will always work best when the concocted enemies are either disadvantaged or easily subject to disrespect.

The fabrication of threats and promotion of retaliatory discrimination has long been an effective means of population control. It prohibits information access and dialogue and encourages indiscriminate labeling and abuse of easily targeted groups. It thereby persuades human rights defenders, who would normally stand in opposition to tyranny, to support the work of tyrants.

This method is successful in part because it sidetracks potential opponents into the service of the power group. It forces attention away from the real issues. It prohibits dialogue, information sharing, education and critical thinking about the real issues. It classifies those who continue to focus on the real issues as possibly dangerous conspiracy theorists. And it justifies state and non-state sanctioned abuse against these groups as well.

The strategies of oppression are visible for all to see:

First, create fear.

Second, divide the population by identifying concocted enemies who threaten safety.

Third, accustom people to the necessity of discriminating against those who don’t agree with state actions or messages.

Fourth, encourage people to promote or acquiesce to having target populations subjected to arbitrary punishment and loss of rights.

To effectively resist such strategies of oppression, we need to be very clear about the principles of dialogue to be used in the context of human rights advocacy.

Advocacy Principles

The following are basic principles for enabling responsible advocacy that relies on cooperation, collaboration, and sharing through dialogue, rather than the identification and vilification and abuse of fabricated enemies.

  1. Be informed about the issues we are opposing or promoting.

It’s essential to avoid sloppy, easy, uninformed use of language that creates enemies and divides communities. Success entails building healthy sustainable communities that protect rights and respect differences–the kind of communities in which we would want to be contributing participants. To begin, we:

–        Heap informed criticism on the problem (e.g. sexualizing young children).

–        Investigate what is being done, by whom, why the actions are wrong or harmful.

–        Identify victims and, if possible, known perpetrators. 

–        Determine the solutions required and the means to achieve these goals. 

In this process we must avoid uninformed criticism and vilification of seemingly associated groups of people. Whether the people in questions are unvaxxed, trans, draft-dodging pacifist, it doesn’t matter—the point of human rights advocacy work is to restore and protect rights and freedoms not to restrict or deny them to targeted groups or individuals.

  1. Anchor arguments in basic human empathy.

Non-violent change comes through conversation and debate within the community, but first we have to sit down at the table together. To get to the table—where we can begin to negotiate positive outcomes—we need to avoid engaging in ad hominem or attacks against the person. Underlying such attacks is a destructive error which is easy to fall into—it goes like this: “I’m right, and you’re wrong, and therefore you should be deprived of your rights and freedoms.” Avoiding this error requires vigilance—we must recognize what fuels our engagement. Are we acting with a clearly formulated community-building intention or are we merely reacting? To be effective agents of change, we need to be clear, in our own minds, about what we hope to accomplish through our interactions with others. 

  1. Resist Without Resorting to Violence.

Notice what happened with the truckers’ convoy in Ottawa—people were drawn to participate in this extraordinary protest because of the powerful message sent by their coordinated, non-violent resistance. The effectiveness of their resistance is precisely why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, and their cabinet needed to invoke the emergency act and end the freedom voncey. They knew they couldn’t lawfully win a battle against such a well-disciplined, coherent and responsible protest.

  1. Be solution focused and flexible

It’s not enough for us to be critical of what is happening. We have to generate fair solutions capable of taking us where we want to get to. The difference between simply resisting and developing solutions is that with the latter you begin with the end in mind, and you work in a manner that is ethically consistent with that goal.

  1. Continue to question whether what you are doing is working or is right

It’s also not enough for us to pursue the right goal. We have to continue to question whether what we are doing is working or not. We must be prepared to evaluate our own performance and make changes as needed to achieve our goals. The work of creating a healthy, compassionate, reasonable and just community is not something that happens once and for all. The work is one of constant responsibility and accountability.

Words and Values

If we accept that the public good requires and comprises qualities of fairness, justice, self-determining strength, tolerant cooperation, and compassionate mutual aid, then the ultimate goal of our advocacy is to develop these resources. This means upholding and exemplifying the ethical standards and values of our communities even as we resist the forces that seek to destroy them. 

To restore the public sphere, we must be disciplined in our advocacy work. And to this end we must support personal and collective activism that unambiguously works to secure rights and freedoms for all and the re-establishment of democracy.

As We Work Together to Advance the Public Good and Restore the Public Sphere

    Words are the only tool to effectively:

  •       Oppose tyranny;
  •       Protect rights and freedoms, democracy and the rule of law;
  •       Promote mutual respect while pursuing truth and justice;
  •       Define, Cultivate, and safeguard the public good.

    Words can:

  •       Inform, educate and persuade supporters and opponents;
  •       Strengthen advocacy and dialogue through education;
  •       Foster collective decision making;
  •       Expose wrongs and harms, and identify victims and perpetrators;
  •       Achieve remedies for victims, accountability for perpetrators, and prevention.

 

On the other hand,

For Those Working to Dominate the World and Subjugate its People 

Words can also

  •       Deceive, propagandize,  censor, divide and conquer communities, enable tyranny;
  •       Fabricate threats, create fear, compel obedience, instill hatred, justify abuse;
  •       Label without foundation, critics and non-compliers as dangerous and deserving of punishment;
  •   Criminalize dissent; impose severe penalties on critics and summary dismissal of criticisms; justify violation of law and democratic processes as necessary to address declared emergencies or crises.

In other words, there is a lot at stake when it comes to the language we use and the way we use it. Fortunately, there’s no need for advocacy groups to reinvent the wheel when it comes to effective discourse practi c es. On the contrary we can use, courtroom argument as a practical and authoritative model for civil discourse

Adapting Basic Courtroom Procedure for Human Rights Advocacy

The trial process can serve as a helpful model for informed debate and effective advocacy. It  requires preparation, pleadings, presentation, challenges, and submissions, as well as the acceptance of outcomes based on fair determination of the facts and correct interpretation of the law.

o   Preparation – involves investigating facts, evidence, law, strategies and identifying the remedy or goal;

o   Pleadings – involves stating the parties, facts, evidence and law relied on and the remedy sought;  

o   Presentation – involves presenting accurate evidence supporting the remedy required;

o   Challenges – involve challenging the adequacy, reliability, truth of the opposing party’s evidence;

o   Submissions – involve arguing for the remedy required by properly interpreted law & established facts. 

While vigorously attacking or challenging the evidence and submissions of opponents, human-rights advocates, just like the legal professionals specializing in courtroom representation, must use respectful language when addressing other advocates, the decision maker, and the parties to the dispute.  Advocates cannot attack each other personally, use derogatory labels unsupported by the evidence, or widen the accusations to include groups or individuals not named in the initial pleadings. 

If protection of rights and freedoms is a central goal, then the people defending rights need to understand that rights must be protected for all irrespective of “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”

 

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