timeimmortal

Ezra Levant has been doing some research, and has noted that there seem to be quite a lot of parallels between modern Canadian human rights commissions and their medieval counterparts. Not surprisingly, the most striking parallels concern the original Star Chamber from around 1632.

For example:

I was fascinated to learn that, among its other victims, entire juries were tried in the Star Chamber if they didn’t render the politically appropriate verdict.

But the most striking analogy was a Star Chamber order of 1632, which is a template for the show trial of Maclean’s magazine of 2008.

According to Wikipedia, 1632 is when the Star Chamber:

…banned all “news books” because of complaints from Spanish and Austrian diplomats that coverage of the Thirty Years’ War in England was unfair. As a result, newsbooks pertaining to this matter were often printed in Amsterdam and then smuggled into the country, until the ban was lifted six years later.

So foreign trouble-makers who objected to free speech and who insisted on politically correct versions of current events managed to censor the news. Plus ca change.

But wait, it gets better:

I have found a legal precedent that the BCHRT can use to convict [comedian Guy Earle] even if his jokes were funny. Especially if his jokes were funny!

I spent some time today reading a book I found on Google Books. (It’s an amazing resources; not only has Google scanned countless books, included old and rare books, but they’ve made those books text-searchable.) I was reading a book called The Star Chamber, published in 1880, that contained hundreds of decisions of that court. It also has a very interesting preface, that describes that court’s descent from a well-intentioned idea — a court big and tough enough to take on law-breaking bishops and sherriffs who would be impervious to justice of regular courts — into a corrupt political tool used to destroy the kings enemies, and confiscate their wealth.

The book has a readable summary of hundreds of cases. In it, I read a footnote about someone fined “severlie”, not for telling an offensive joke — but for laughing at it.

I couldn’t find the case of the illegal laugher, but I found a reference to it in a defamation judgment in another old book of Star Chamber cases. It starts on page 149, and the reference to the laugher is on page 152…

It’s nice to know that Canadian justice has caught up with the rest of the world and adopted 17th century standards of jurisprudence.