Hate, Violence, and Lessons of History. . . . .

Terrible events have a tendency of focusing people's attention. As I said yesterday, it is not always a matter of cause and effect, people see something that causes people to look at what has been going on and where they have been going. A health crisis, or a food crisis, or violent event, all of these kinds of events can cause people to reexamine how things have been going and why.

Now, personally I don't think we really need a terrible event to remind us that the right-wing has poisoned the political atmosphere in North America with vitriolic, hateful rhetoric that belittles democracy and belittles all of us. We should not forget our history lessons. Fascism in Europe (and we are not just talking about Germany here) gradually moved in against the back-drop of angry, hateful speech in which the right blamed the left for everything from moral decay to tooth decay. The vocal advocates of Fascism often tried to hide behind respectability and political legitimacy but when you look back you can see the gradual decay of genuine political discourse and the rise in scapegoating the vulnerable and systematic lying in the public sphere. And let us not forget that in many cases the vocal right-wing opponents of everything and everybody on the left, were not the ones who eventually took up arms and organized the worst events of fascism. Some people just set the tone that legitimized the more radical voices of hate and violence.

Make no mistake, people like John Baird, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Pierre Poilievre, and Glen Beck are the ones that are poisoning the political atmosphere and setting the stage for a shift in the paradigm. Today such hateful speech influenced one sad, unbalanced man. But history has demonstrated that such rhetoric can eventually pervert an entire generation to acts of terrible violence. No matter what these people say or do, we must continue to stand for a more compassionate, more cooperative, more humane society. Jean-Paul Sartre once said that we have two options for the future of our race, a form of Barbarism or a form of Socialism. The statement is more clear today than it was when the great existentialist first said it. The barbarians may be at the gate but the only method we have to struggle against them is a cooperative and compassionate society. In the 1930s, it took too long to realize where the anger and hate of the right-wing was leading. Let's not let it happen again.

Rex Murphy the simpleton. . . .

Like most semi-rational people who watch politics and have some sense of non-partisan analysis, I find Rex Murphy a nauseating simpleton. This article  http://tiny.cc/rxmurphy   is a further extension of his simplistic analysis which so many people find frustrating. 

Mr. Murphy's analysis assumes, like so many partisan Conservatives, that the only thing that stands between Harper and a majority government is his occasional strategic error which trouble many voters because they think that it speaks of some hidden agenda. Murphy, like many Conservatives, think that Harper has learned a lot during his tenure as PM and that he has modified his view significantly and that if he just refrained from making these occasional silly errors in judgment he would be cruising to a majority. 

The problems with such an analysis are multi-fold. The primary problem with such an analysis is that it over-looks the painfully numerous attacks that Harper and his government have perpetrated against the principles of democracy. Now, whether these attacks demonstrate an inherent 'nasty' side to Harper's personality is a debatable point, but I think it is clear that a very large majority of Canadians object strongly to the ideological import of these attacks. Wearing sweater vests will not make up for this because it is not really a question of 'image' it is a question of ideology. 

In other words, Murphy and his ilk, imagine that people are frightened of Harper's "hidden" agenda when in fact it is the more obvious agenda that he has been openly pursuing that is the problem for many people. The so-called tactical mistakes that Harper has made like the recent prorogation of parliament do indeed turn off a number of people who might otherwise vote for the Conservatives because they make people feel as though Harper is mean and power-hungry and, in this case, involved in a real coverup. But for many people it has helped to remind them of Harper's basic ideological offensiveness. Rex Murphy writes almost as though no one really objects to what is a troublingly Americanization of politics in Canada and an ideological agenda that seems to be undermining the parliamentary tradition at the most basic level. There is no doubt that Harper's nasty ultra-partisan streak makes selling this ideology that much more difficult.. But at the heart of this matter is a basic ideological struggle between Harper's Machiavellian, centralizing, pro-big business, anti-democratic, in-humane capitalist agenda on the one hand, and those who oppose that agenda from various points of view on the other. Mr. Murphy, and many others, are unable to acknowledge this because, for one - you can never be totally straightforward with such an agenda but you have to sugar coat it with ideological double-speak, and for another - many of them don't even understand the ideological import of their own beliefs. They are fooled by their own propaganda and believe, for example, that Harper is really concerned about crime when the crime rate is slowly going down and the so-called 'tough on crime' agenda is just a blatant calculation to win votes of a population that is obsessed with crime because of a sensationalizing media. 

All I can say is the fact that someone with Rex Murphy's simplistic and shallow analysis can be a major media spokesperson suggests that we are not that far away from the Sarah Palin world of politics.