Fascism, a Liberal Party Legacy. . .

There is no question that the Harper government is a de facto fascist organization. I refer you to this excellent outline of what constitutes fascism in case you are so hopelessly naive or blindly partisan that you don't know what is going on. However, as bad as this government is, and it is worse than even most of its vociferous detractors suspect, the seeds for this fascism were planted by successive Liberal Governments who benefited from the undue power of the PMO and the various short-comings of our British Parliamentary system. The Liberals could, at any point, have embraced electoral and parliamentary reforms that would have ensured that our present fascist government could not systematically take control of every element of our nation and run roughshod over rights, ignore the law, and gerrymander the system to their advantage. For years the LPC didn't care about our lack of democracy, lack of transparency, or our lack of accountability, because they were the ones benefiting from it. There is no doubt that the present government is much worse in this regard than previous ones and that it is led by a group of men that is clearly mentally ill and models of dictatorship. But we are just seeing the result of decades of neglect on the part of the Liberal Party which, as long as it was in power, had no regard for our democratic short-comings.  When you neglect your democracy, that neglect comes back to haunt you. The Liberals were like abusive parents who have nurtured an abusive child and is now seeing the results. And it looks as though things will now get considerably worse as the present government is abusive of democracy to a whole new degree and its leaders are mentally disturbed, paranoid, insulated, whack-jobs who seem to be entirely out of control in their thirst for power.

And despite all of this, amid the LPC big hype for "renewal," they have entirely failed to own up to their terrible legacy of mistakes and power-hungry abuses. They still don't get it. They are out of power and because of their abuses of democracy there is a good chance we have lost our democracy permanently. But are they calling for real electoral and parliamentary reform? Not in the slightest. They still live under the delusion that they will return to power and be able to enjoy their traditional abuses of that power, and with the more corrupted system that the present fascist government leaves them they are hoping to rain down an unprecedented revenge on their opponents. And like the Liberals before them, the  present government is wholly ignoring the prospect that they will eventually become victims of the very abuse and hatred that they are now peddling. This points to something worse than a cycle of abuse, rather it points to a downward spiral that will end in the destruction of everything we hold dear.

So my message to the Liberals is - next time you go out of your way to criticize our present fascist government, remember, your laid the groundwork for this failure and you are showing no signs of changing the system of failure to which you gave birth. Our present government is twisted, immoral, fascist, and dangerous. But it is the child of the LPC and that parent company is still its old self with no signs of regret or reform.

Criminal Government in action. . . .

WHAT?! You mean this government which has no respect for the law, no interest in democracy, and thinks of parliament as only something to get in the way of its perverse agenda, refuses once again to respect the will of the House? I am shocked! I sure didn't see that coming.

And in the next couple of weeks we will all be surprised as the LPC does nothing in return! 

Partisanship past and future . . . Clarifications

My recent post on partisanship elicited a number of strong comments, a couple reasonable and justified and a couple of offensive wing-nuts who actually think a group of Jewish trade-unionists run the world. (These comments were justifiably rejected)

As a point of clarification I want to say that the quote that I used to suggest a troubling trend in political discourse on Liberal blogs was in a blog that subsequently contained a number of reasonable points concerning the recent NDP convention. I didn’t name the blog simply because I found the unfortunate words at the beginning of the blog to largely nullify any reasonable discourse because such poison language can hardly be the foundation of a real political debate. It is hardly reasonable to say to someone “you are a no-good, dishonest, lying, stupid, weasel” and then say “but here are some of your good points.”

Though the blogger from whom I took the quote had a number of cogent points later in his post, not only was the possibility for meaningful discourse poisoned,  but it was never my intention to get into a wider debate about specific policies of the NDP some of which I agree with and some of which I do not. My blog is very seldom about policy issues. Though I have attacked specific policies of the Conservative Government, usually when I address politics I am talking in wider terms about political philosophy and the various paradigms in which we operate. One of the reasons that I seldom engage in policy debates is that the people with whom I disagree are working in a different paradigm to the one in which I operate and for policy debates to be meaningful it would require far more space and time than a blog offers.

I have been accused of actually misrepresenting myself as non-partisan because my blog appears on a NDP blog site. First of all, I was completely unaware that I appeared on any NDP related site and have never seen this for myself, but given the nature of the Web I guess it is possible. Second of all, I say to the one or two readers out there who actually read my blog that I have never been a member of the NDP, I would never shy away from criticizing the Party if such criticisms seem warranted to me, and If my blog does appear on an NDP related blog site this should not be interpreted as evidence of some kind of party affiliation.

Finally, my recent post was intended only to address what I see as a growing trend of poisoned discourse in relation to partisanship in Canadian politics. I am certain that I have also been guilty of this at times, and for this I express my regrets. I have always reserved my harshest words for the Conservatives because I think that beyond simply matters of policy the party in its present manifestation represents a serious threat to human rights and democracy in Canada.

Yours in the struggle.

Kirby

Partisanship past and future . . . Continued

Here is a good example of the outrageous, deeply ignorant, ad homonym, and for the most part completely wrong, criticism of the NDP coming out of Liberal blogs. 

The New Democrat Party are sanctimonious, arrogant, pious, inflexible, uncooperative, self-serving, beholden to union interests, trapped in the 1960s, white, cowardly, anti-business, and anti-fiscal responsibility.

Now this stuff could just as easily have been written by a Conservative blogger and when it comes to this kind of ignorant and abusive behavior I really think it is below comment or contempt. (I won't even point out the glaring grammatical error but I will let you find it for yourself). I think the 'trapped in the 1960s' comment is quite amusing, particularly given the slow death that Capitalism is suffering as we speak. 

But most significantly this little snippet reminds me of the similarity of many Liberals to the Conservatives not only in content but in style. And that, my friends, is the real rub. It reminds me of someone I know who hates her mother and has slowly become exactly like her. The Liberals are growing ever closer to the Conservative party and it almost seems as they strike out against the NDP as a kind of veiled self-loathing as a result of their own failures both in terms of their image and in terms of substantive political discourse. For years now the Liberals have been telling us that the Conservatives don't play well with others and yet this blog abuse of the NDP has become endemic. The Liberal Party was once an important and vital political institution in Canada but alas, no longer. 

As I have said many times, I belong to no party, and will criticize any political policy, strategy, or style with which I disagree. But in the age in which people have been slowly blinded by a huge lie of (so-called) market ideology, there are many cases in which the NDP has been the only party that has stood up and talked about the various failures of this market. And many Liberals have shown incredible hypocrisy by defending universal healthcare in light of the debate in the US while at the same time excoriating the NDP which is the party of universality in this country. So it goes . . . 

Fascism and Western Politics

I recently used the word Fascism and watched a number of other bloggers go crazy, while others suggested that they were disappointed with my rather angry outburst. So, though I admit that the outburst was initially a little strong, (and I rewrote it the same day), there is an important issue here that should be discussed.

Fascism is a word that is particularly provocative and raises the shackles of many, particularly in right-wing circles where they don’t like being accused of any association with this particular political approach. However, it should be made clear, and I have talked about it on my blog before, that despite the excessive emotion that the word elicits, it is a word that applies quite well to many Western Governments and political parties.

Mussolini famously defined Fascism as a significant collusion between Big Government and big business. And it is conveniently forgotten how popular Mussolini was in North America in the 1930s. This popularity resulted in a special edition of Forbes magazine devoted to Mussolini’s politics which suggested that this was the future of Capitalism. This particular edition of Forbes is now almost impossible to obtain but it makes clear how Capitalists and Conservatives felt about Fascism.

Then in the 50s an American academic and statesman named Bertram Gross wrote a remarkable book entitled Friendly Fascism which outlined how, despite the war, the US had slowly instituted fundamental principles of Fascism through the back door, though with less of the blatantly racist and militaristic rhetoric of the European fascism of the 1930s.

Since Bertram’s book, the fascist mechanisms in the US and other Western countries have dramatically increased and the connection between big business and big government has continually expanded, though in many cases this relationship is so cozy and inherent that it goes unnoticed. Another writer who has talked about this is of course Gore Vidal who documented the military-industrial complex of the US in a startling fashion. Noam Chomsky has also added a great deal to this discourse as have Howard Zinn and a number of other writers. 

Last year I wrote a long blog discussing why the Harper Government is essentially fascist as outlined by Mussolini, Gross, and Vidal. This is not hyperbole but a serious political discourse which most people in the West are unwilling to engage in simply because they don’t want to admit the fundamental ways in which Government has become aligned with business. Furthermore it is not hyperbole to talk about the ways that supposedly moderate parties like the Liberals under a leader like Ignatieff could be seen as inheritors of the friendly fascist tradition. Besides Mr. Ignatieff’s obvious support for Western militarism (including the militarism of the State of Israel), Ignatieff has defended torture, and uses a political discourse that is at times frighteningly Euro-centric and stands up for many of the basic assumptions that neo-conservatism stands for.

Though a blog does not afford the space to properly address the intricacies of these issues, we ignore them at our peril. Democracy in the Western nations is increasingly in crisis: participation rates are falling, public discourse is narrowing (largely as a result of media ownership), access to political office is becoming increasingly more difficult, political discourse is creeping ever closer to business discourse, and Conservative parties are continually attacking basic human and labour rights. I recommend Gross’s book as well as several books by Vidal in order to realize that suggesting a link between Western Governments (and Parties) and Fascism may sound provocative but is by no means hyperbole. Conservatives (and even Liberals) may bristle at the connection but if they ignore it they are not being honest about political discourse.