| "The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
– attributed to John Swinton, Chief of Staff, New York Times, 1953, at his retirement party
This is the quote Edmonton’s Verne Warwick points to after he is questioned about the books he distributes in his Individuals For Common Law mail-order catalogue. It is in a book he and a group of colleagues drafted under the name C.L.E.A.R. (Common Law Education And Rights) Initiative as a cure-all blueprint for reforming the Canadian political and economic systems.
To Warwick, the Canadian federal government system is illegal, but the media doesn’t bother to expose the truth. No stranger to Albertan fringe politics, he chaired the Canadian Centre for Economic Stability, a constitutional reform think-tank that counted among its members Jim Keegstra, the Eckville high school teacher who taught that the Holocaust never happened. He has been associated with the Libertarian Party of Canada, also frequented by tax protestors. In 2001, he was a featured speaker at Wes Mann’s Festival of the Ages.
At the height of the Western separatist craze of the early 1980s, a Saskatchewan businessman named Elmer Knutson had a novel interpretation of Canadian government. He maintained that in the Statute of Westminster of 1931, England not only gave independence to former colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Irish Free State, South Africa and Newfoundland, but to their constituent provinces as well. Thus, the provinces were not beholden to Ottawa because they never reached an agreement to reconstitute Canada.
The Constitution Act of 1982 came (nine provinces signed on to patriate the constitution, anyway), and Knutson’s Western Federation Association went (it was a sister organization of the Western Canada Concept). His idea that the federal government is illegal, however, has not died.
Today, Warwick disseminates the theory through his mail-order catalogue of books and videos on – as the name might suggest – Anglo-Saxon common law, detaxing and separatism. The catalogue contains many items that align Warwick with the likes of tax protestors like Eldon Warman and his colleague Fred Kyburz: Judge Fay Flyers (details to follow), information on how to detax and books repudiating the need for a driver’s licence. There are also more suspicious items on the list that are recognizable as staples from American far-right reading lists:
· Operation Vampire Killer 2000 by Jack McLamb, a former police officer and a leading figure in the U.S. militia movement. The book prophesizes an invasion of the United States by a United Nations army and the subsequent institution of a communist One World Government. The target date was Y2K, so it is a bit stale. McLamb, along with ex-Green Beret Bo Gritz, founded Almost Heaven, a real estate development in Idaho geared towards paranoid survivalists – the ultimate gated community.
· Trance Formation of America by Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips. A messed up woman (O’Brien) and her recovered memory therapist (Phillips) work through recollections of how she was part of a secret CIA mind control program used to supply teenage love slaves to prominent American politicians to fulfill their rape fantasies. Names dropped include Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, George Bush Sr., Dick Cheney and Boxcar Willie. This is porn for people who are pro-censorship.
· Who Is Esau-Edom? by Christian Identity preacher Charles Weisman. The book predicts and promotes the future genocide of the Jews. Incidentally, Christian Identity is the religion of choice for white supremacists.
Warwick almost consented to an interview. When the subject of the above titles was broached, he launched into a bellicose lecture about who really runs the media, asserting that only someone behind the scenes could coach a journalist to ask such questions. He points to the Swinton quote. Interview over.
There is plenty of merit in arguing about how media ownership affects its content, but there are serious flaws with the Swinton passage. A check of the New York Times Index for 1953 makes no mention of Swinton. "Chief of Staff" is a title reserved for politicians and military men, not newspapers editors.
The John Swinton the quote may be attributed to – if it is an actual quote at all – was a journalist from the 1800s who did work at the New York Times during the American civil war. Later he ran a paper promoting his strongly pro-union, anti-slavery and anti-racist opinions. In that era, he would have been derided as a commie. Irony indeed.
PAMPHLETEERING AGAINST THE CONSPIRACY
Generally, people get royally pissed when receiving traffic tickets. It does not take a cultural anthropologist to identify it as a part of human nature. Only a small percentage of humans, however, will claim that it is part of a One World Government plot.
Fred Kyburz of Coleman, Alberta is one of the few. In 1991, the friend of Eldon Warman formed a loosely knit organization, named it Patriots on Guard and started protesting Brian Mulroney’s introduction of the GST. The organization has since changed the focus of its ire to the internationalist conspiracies Kyburz rails against in his newsletter and Web site.
The first of Kyburz’s traffic ticket battles against the New World Order was in 1995. He appeared in a Cochrane courtroom to argue his case after being caught driving without insurance. Usually it is an open and shut case, but according to Kyburz’s interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon common law, the courts had no jurisdiction over him because he was a "flesh and blood man" rather than a "person" defined by contract law. Furthermore, he pointed out that the Magna Carta of 1215 states nobody should be taxed to use the roads and highways. Insurance, licences and registration, he maintained, are taxes under the Magna Carta.
Right-wing anarchists of the "freedom movement" cite the Magna Carta as their sacred document. Historians normally regard it as the seminal document in a long evolution towards modern constitutional democracy because, in it, the King of England conceded that he was not all-powerful. It is safe to say the context in which it was conceived was different than that of 20th century Canada.
In mainstream legal philosophy, common law is the practice of making laws based on the customs of the people. If society, by and large, behaves a certain way, then statutes and court decisions should reflect that. Its second aspect holds that judicial decisions should remain consistent with precedents set in the courts – that is, a case is argued and decided upon previous judgments involving similar circumstances. Therefore, the common law evolves as times change. Those preaching Anglo-Saxon common law lose sight of the last point.
Calgary defense lawyer and part-time traffic court commissioner Allan Fay presided over Kyburz’s hearing. Suffice to say, he did not buy Kyburz’s argument, nor was he convinced an 800-year-old treaty was relevant to the regulation of motor vehicles.
"We started the trial, I ruled against his common law arguments," remembers Fay. "Eventually it got to the point where the Crown had made out their case, and I called on him (Kyburz). He says, ‘That vehicle was insured and I can prove it.’
"I say, ‘Let’s put this matter over, get your insurance information and deal with it.’ In the interim, someone, either on Mr. Kyburz’s behalf or someone sympathetic to his cause, began circulating these letters around Calgary titled ‘Good Day Judge Fay,’ basically accusing me of being part of a black robe conspiracy and reiterating his common law position. In addition to that, I got a couple of threatening phone calls at my office. They never had the courage to identify themselves."
Fay then declared a mistrial, thinking a conviction would make him look vengeful and an acquittal would make him appear intimidated.
In one of his 27 pamphlets, Kyburz wrote the following to Fay:
"What have you done besides taking our liberties, stealing our money under colour of law and protecting and supporting the agenda of the internationalists? An agenda which is to subjugate all of us into a One-World-Government-slave-state…. Do you commit your crimes of theft and extortion against us in the hope to earn yourself a spot in this future One-World-Government set-up?"
Eight years after the fact, the Judge Fay Flyers are still circulated among radical-right circles in Western Canada, to whom it makes perfect sense that a Calgary traffic court commissioner is synonymous with a plan for a universal totalitarian government.
In 1996, Kyburz was again caught driving a vehicle without insurance, licence plates or a driver’s licence in Blairmore. Again, he attempted to admit arguments before the court based on semantics and old British statutes. Again, his arguments were thrown out. He was found guilty and sentenced to a $2,500 fine or 60 days in jail. He chose the latter.
Kyburz continued to distribute and update the Judge Fay Flyers. He went so far as to include the home phone numbers and addresses of the arresting police officers, crown prosecutor and presiding judge.
It is not that much of a stretch to presume somebody who makes himself out to be a political prisoner over a traffic violation has a severe martyr complex. Maybe Kyburz was trying his best to show solidarity to fellow prisoners of the New World Order.
During the same time period that Kyburz was going through his car insurance tribulations, the Montana Freemen were leading their own revolt southeast of Alberta. The Freemen – who included former Calgary police officer Dale Jacobi – became famous for their 81-day armed standoff with the FBI at their Jordan, Montana farm in 1996. They did not pay taxes or recognize the legitimacy of the federal government. The common law power went to their heads when they began posting bounties on the heads of local police officers and issuing subpoenas to civil servants and politicians. A less euphemistic description would be vigilantism. When some of the Freemen got arrested for their para-legal antics prior to the standoff, they responded by sending threatening letters to jurors and making threatening phone calls to police and prosecutors.
Granted, Kyburz never went so far as to put a bounty on the head of any of the law enforcement officials he encountered, but the rhetoric was similar. Since his days in traffic court, Kyburz has continued pamphleteering against the establishment. In 2000, Patriots on Guard delivered a series of flyers door to door in Kamloops during Eldon Warman’s assault trial in that city. In 2001, the group was busy with an anti-fluoride campaign in Calgary.
From time to time, Kyburz and Warman do the right-wing anarchist lecture circuit together, divulging their common law and detax methods to disgruntled citizens for a fee. After Kyburz’s other political views – such as those on holocaust revisionism – were called into question in a Vancouver Sun article prior to a 2001 Port Coquitlam speaking engagement, Kyburz became a bit more candid on the subject. In this excerpt from one of his news bulletins on his Patriots on Guard Web site, he addresses a member of the Canadian Jewish Congress quoted in the Sun article:
"Mr. Goldman, why don't you prove the abductions of children, their sexual mistreatment, their misuse for child pornography videos and very often these children's murder by your Jewish brethren false? Wouldn't it be very beneficial for the Jewish community if you could be portrayed as righteous people instead of child molesters, child abductors, producers of child pornography and murderers? The list is very long of such aberrations and heinous crimes by your brethren…. I hear you scream now ‘ANTI-SEMITE.’ No, I am not an anti-Semite. I am anti-crime, anti-child-molester, anti-murderer. Yes, Mr. Goldman, it is frightening what one uncovers when digging in your people's behaviour!"
An anti-racism campaigner and Ontario lawyer named Richard Warman (no relation to Eldon Warman) took offence to the site and had it shut down. Kyburz posted diatribes against Richard Warman on a mirror site. Warman took his complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Last May, it ruled Kyburz must pay Warman $30,000 damages for inciting hatred against him in addition to fining him $7,500 for wilfully spreading hatred via the Internet. Kyburz did not bother to appear in his own defense. After all, he does not recognize the authority of federal institutions.
Ironically, Fay wrote off Kyburz’s Judge Fay Flyers as a case of the downside of freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, Kyburz does not respond to interview requests. |
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