Is Canada a Tyranny? Aristotle on Justin Trudeau
By David Solway
The word “tyranny,” originally τυραννία (tyrannia) in the Greek, seems to have become part of the current lexicon. The term derives from τύραννος (tyrannos), which translates as “lord, master, sovereign” but eventually acquired more sinister connotations in the classical period of Greek history under the cruel and oppressive rule of various demagogues like, among others, Polycrates of Samos and, more famously, the grasping Dionysius of Syracuse.
In the present historical moment in most Western nations, tyrants or wannabe tyrants have begun to proliferate — in France, Holland, Australia, New Zealand, the European Union as a whole, the United States, and my own country, Canada. Especially Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “an effete pseudo-intellectual,” as Matt Taibbi describes him, seems to have become the poster boy for the resurgence of the modern tyrant.
To get a better sense of how tyrants operate to impose and maintain their rule, one would do well to return to the source of the subject in Book 5, Chapter 11 of Aristotle’s perennial study, The Politics, where the philosopher examines the careers and consequences of notable specimens of the breed. Aristotle lays it down that there are essentially three methods of enforcing a tyrannical regime upon a people.
- “Citizens should be of poor or abject dispositions, for such men never propose to aspire against anyone.” To keep the people poor, “It is necessary to multiply taxes, as at Syracuse, where Dionysius in the space of five years collected all the private property of his subjects into his own coffers.”
- “The second is, that they should have no confidence in each other; for while they have not this, the tyrant is safe enough from destruction. The tyrant must endeavor by every means possible to divide the people from one another… For which reason, they are always at enmity with those of merit.” (Emphasis mine.) “For he who supports his dignity, and is a friend to freedom, encroaches upon the superiority and the despotism of the tyrant: such men, therefore, they naturally hate, as destructive to their government.” And such men must be suppressed. Here Aristotle channels his mentor Plato, who wrote in Book 8 of The Republic that a prime means of enforcing tyrannical rule is “by the customary unjust accusations to bring a citizen into court,” whose foregone conclusion is exile or hemlock.