The Demonization Ideology Of The Bourgoisie Elite

Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper
in a pick-up hockey game with fellow fascists

I spent a half an hour this morning in an online discussion about whether or not Stephen Harper, Canada's prime minister, is a fascist. I don’t know why I bother but it’s my own fault.

I know that as soon as I see or hear the words ‘regime’, ‘fascist’, ‘oppression’, ‘dictator’ and other words of their ilk, there really isn’t going to be much point to the discussion. In a country that is as democratic and free as Canada, using words like that betrays how poorly informed the individual and how weak the argument. It’s usually the sign of yet another ideological hissy-fit rather than anything closely resembling objective and informed analysis.

I get so tired of it. It’s almost like we’ve lost the ability to actually think rather than just react.

I don’t know when disagreeing with a government suddenly meant that the government was fascist but that’s the current buzz word. It’s being tossed about in democracies all over the world and against governments on both sides of the political divide. It’s absurd. The person I tried to speak with this morning went so far as to try and compare Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper with Benito Mussolini. It doesn’t get much sillier than that.

Personally I find it offensive. We have this wonderful opportunity to discuss and debate real issues in an attempt to find solutions but it is being squandered by unenlightened, petty-bourgeois, pseudo-intellectual elites intent on proving their prejudice and intolerance are actually righteous indignation.

People are dying in places like Syria to get out from under repressive regimes and gain what is so carelessly taken for granted here by people who throw around extreme language about oppression as they sip their Starbucks mocha lattes.

Canada is a country where people are free to say pretty much what they want, when and where they want, no matter how stupid it is. People have been tortured, died and/or have simply disappeared for saying a lot less in many other countries.

I'm not particularly fond of Stephen Harper. I find him mean-spirited, hypocritical, cynical and opportunistic. I think he has the ethics of a cheap used-car salesperson on a back lot. In other words, he is pretty much like most politicians these days, just one more in a long line of people who put their party and winning and maintaining power ahead of their country and its citizens. But having said that, let’s look at the issue. Is the Harper government fascist? According to Wikipedia, fascism is defined as follows:

“Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education, and eugenics.”

While there is much for which to criticize the current Conservative government, I fail to see much in common with it and this definition. Let’s look at it point by point.

Individuals united in national identity  by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture and blood. The current government has a number of members from the English, French, Sikh, Chinese and other cultures which tends to contradict this idea. Goodness gracious, it even has gays and women in powerful cabinet positions. To go a step further, it was the Harper government that went so far as to introduce legislation recognizing Quebec as a distinct society within Canada which also contradicts this part of the definition and it was the Conservatives  who went out of their way to successfully attract ethnic voters (a constituency that had pretty much been the sole province of the Liberals) in the last election. So let’s move on.

A single-party totalitarian state. 

The last time I looked there were five political parties represented in the House of Commons one more than the four from the last parliament. There were even more which fielded candidates in the election. If a single-party state is an objective of fascism, either the Conservatives aren’t really fascists or in the alternative they’re just not very good at it.

Mass mobilization of the nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical education and eugenics.

Martial Law declared in Canada by Liberal
government of Pierre Trudeau 1970

It’s pretty hard to mobilize a country to one ideology when it offers the freedom to all to form their own opinions and to express those opinions freely. There has been no crackdown or censorship of the media or of free-speech.

Some have tried to suggest that the police response to rioters during the G8/G20 protests are an indication of a federal government suppressing the right of dissent but that was the City of Toronto police service over which the Conservative government has no control. Nor does it even come close to the Liberal declaration of martial law in response to the FLQ crisis which put troops in our streets (something the Paul Martin Liberals would later accuse Stephen Harper of wanting to do during the 2005 election campaign). It was state-control unlike anything Canada had ever experienced before (or since). Virtually over night, the rights of Canadian citizens were stripped and hundreds were rounded up, arrested and taken from their homes without warrant and held without habeus corpus, which the Trudeau Liberal government had suspended.

Canadian troops on streets in
Ottawa and Montreal

Even the state-owned national broadcaster trashes the government with impunity and gets paid handsomely ($1 billion/yr) to do so. The recent Occupy nonsense underscores just how far government is willing to allow dissent to go. It cost this country more than $2 million in damages but there wasn’t a peep out of the federal government or any attempt to shut Occupy down by the Conservatives. 

I don’t see any sign of eugenics happening any time soon either although the Conservative government did put through a small tax deduction towards certain sports activities for children. I suppose technically that qualifies as mass mobilization of the nation through physical education but to be honest it’s a pretty tepid attempt at state control at best.

The simple fact is that the current hysteria has nothing to do with fascism and everything to do with too many people who confuse their personal dislike for something as rational political analysis. Too many of these people are guided by ill-informed opinion that makes their positions so weak that the only thing left to them is to demonize the opposition. 

Personally, I don’t care if we agree or not on an issue and I enjoy a good debate where people trade points of view. It’s a time-honoured method of moving an issue forward but what passes for debate today is specious. It’s degenerated to the same kind of over-the-top and inane name-calling of spoiled school children who don’t like and bully the unpopular kid in the class.

If you removed the words Stephen Harper and/or Conservative and replaced them with the label of a religious or cultural group, some of the commentary would actually be charged as a hate crime and the person responsible would be prosecuted under existing laws passed by the Liberals.

The bourgeoisie don't like to see themselves that way, of course, they're too busy demonizing others but they should remind themselves that the thing we fear in others tends to be the thing we most fear in ourselves.

It’s absurd to suggest that Stephen Harper is a fascist just as it is absurd to label Pierre Trudeau a tyrannical dictator.

Most politicians are opportunists who walk a fine line between what they think the country wants and what they believe is best for the country.  Do they usually get it right? Sometimes but not always; opportunism and politics often get in the way for all political parties.

Most politicians and their parties pander to various special interest groups. The Conservatives, Liberal and NDP all have theirs and the Green Party would have more of them if they were larger with a broader appeal or could find more available groups to which to pander.

The simple reality is that all political parties campaign from either the left or the right but govern from the centre. That’s just a hard cold fact and even the Conservatives have been criticized extensively  by the media and others for hugging the centre line when they're not being accused of being Nazis.

How North Korea maintains control
of its citizens

Mussolini and Hitler were fascist dictators. Kim Jung Il, Stalin and Sadaam Hussein were tyrants who terrorized and murdered their own people. That’s tyranny. There isn’t a Canadian politician, including Stephen Harper who has even come close or a Canadian citizen living in anything that is even remotely akin to the oppression of countries like Syria, North Korea or China, so let’s tone down the rhetoric and get back to reality. (although the rounding up and imprisonment of Japanese Canadians during the second world war comes fairly close)

It’s one thing to disagree with, debate and even criticize certain policies and political philosophy, it’s an entirely different thing to characterize those with whom you disagree as something they aren’t.  That’s nothing but cheap hysterical hyperbole at best or extremist propaganda at worst by an intellectually lazy and arrogant elite.

Whatever you call it, it is definitely self-indulgent stupidity and this country isn’t well-served by it.

Godwin's Rule Of Nazi Analogies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

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