Canadian Federal Politics Thread v5

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by rubecube

This is akin to saying he's not a fascist because he hasn't opened any concentration camps yet. Trump didn't just start an insurrection overnight. He obtained his power and his following by employing certain strategies and rhetoric.

Even if we don't think PP is going to direct the Freedom Convoy idiots to storm Parliament, it's still troubling that he's comfortable employing similar tactics and rhetoric as Trump has.

I’m not a fan of his rhetoric either but one of the biggest differences between Pierre and Trump is that right or wrong Trump’s supporters are fiercely loyal to Trump, which means he isn’t interchangeable, whereas Pierre’s supporters are just loyal to anyone but Trudeau and that could be literally be anyone but Trudeau. They didn’t set up boarder blockades or an occupation of the capital because of Pierre and if/when Pierre is running the country I would expect he’ll have a very different view on these actions if they’re opposing his policies because he’s just as power hungry as the next politician. It’s a lot easier for Pierre to lie to people and convince them that he supports their cause when it’s politically convenient and when there are no consequences for doing so.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by rubecube

This is akin to saying he's not a fascist because he hasn't opened any concentration camps yet. Trump didn't just start an insurrection overnight. He obtained his power and his following by employing certain strategies and rhetoric.

Even if we don't think PP is going to direct the Freedom Convoy idiots to storm Parliament, it's still troubling that he's comfortable employing similar tactics and rhetoric as Trump has.

Yes comparing someone who has opened concentration camps to someone who hasn’t opened concentration camps is an exaggeration and you will get push back.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by GGG

Yes comparing someone who has opened concentration camps to someone who hasn’t opened concentration camps is an exaggeration and you will get push back.

That’s not what he did, he’s saying that settling an artificial bar for a comparison makes no sense.

Not every fascist or neo-fascist opened or ran concentration camps, so saying fascist = concentration camps and anything that doesn’t involve concentration camps doesn’t = fascism is stupid.

[CliffFletcher]

People are using some pretty out-there definitions of fascism. Illiberal populism =/= fascism. Fascism has a concrete and specific definition, and loosening that definition to include any authoritarian movement on the right trivializes the horror of the real-world fascist regimes in history.

It’s the same impulse that has right-wingers claiming public health care is a slippery slope to communism. That sort of rhetoric is red meat to true believers, but it makes the person making the claim look kinda ridiculous to everyone else.

[Fuzz]

Cliff is right. We should refer to them as "aspiring fascists".

[Cowboy89]

Some absolutely awful posts the past few pages. We should really be talking about a former defense minister selling out his own country's interests for campaign donations as is in the news, but alas we're likening vanilla bland boring politicians to Hitler and Trump.

If PP is 'fascist' then literally everyone has fascist tendencies and the term loses it's entire meaning.

You can pretty much dismiss any post when they try to compare a Canadian conservative politician to Nazism, fascism etc, and blanket liken them to a US Republican President / Presidential Candidate. It's an old trope as old as time itself and is an emotional, factless appeal to anti-Americanism. In the 2000s it was attacking Harper for his 'Bush-style' tactics. It's a lazy association to slander without doing any work to talk about anything concrete or factual. All it tells you is that a poster is clearly deeply partisan or anti-conservative and offers nothing of value.

Same thing goes for people hammering on Trudeau for being 'communist.' Trudeau isn't a communist nor is Jagmeet Singh. Those comparisons are simply partisan hacks and can be entirely dismissed.

[Ozy_Flame]

You think comparing populist Canadian conservative politicians (who increasingly borrow language and tone from their US populist counterparts) is a dogwhistle for anti-Americanism?

[Duruss]

Pierre is problematicly close to ticking the fascism box. We are lacking Uktra-Nationalism and the needed open misogyny to safely define him as fascist. Or at least thats how I feel about him. Robert Riech has been having some great talks about Trump and I do see parallels here, but it seems more accurate to say Peirre is Authoritarian.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/t...nts-of-fascism



https://robertreich.substack.com/p/i...rump-a-fascist

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Cowboy89

You can pretty much dismiss any post when they try to compare a Canadian conservative politician to Nazism, fascism etc, and blanket liken them to a US Republican President / Presidential Candidate. It's an old trope as old as time itself and is an emotional, factless appeal to anti-Americanism. In the 2000s it was attacking Harper for his 'Bush-style' tactics. It's a lazy association to slander without doing any work to talk about anything concrete or factual. All it tells you is that a poster is clearly deeply partisan or anti-conservative and offers nothing of value.

What if, instead of blanket likening and broad comparisons to Nazism, people point out the use of neo-fascist rhetoric and rhetoric similar to Trump? You know, like what was actually done, and is actually accurate?

What value should we judge someone to have on offer if they have a notebook of words that immediately make them shut down intellectually and completely ignore what is actually being said vs what they want to argue against having been said?

Probably zero, right?

We can probably all agree that PP isn’t actually a fascist (yet) and that his election will (likely) not signal Canada’s descent into fascism… while also being intellectual and well-read enough to recognize fascist rhetoric and his use of it.

The idea that you’re not allowed to recognize fascist rhetoric is broadly idiotic. Hitler and Trump both used similar playbooks to get to power and appeal to the population. That doesn’t mean Trump = Hitler. Pointing out that PP is borrowing from the same playbook does not mean that PP = Trump = Hitler, either. PP doesn’t need to start an insurrection or get a concentration camp rolling for people to be able to point out fascist rhetoric.

This is all quite funny anyway, considering one of the people complaining about comparing fascist rhetoric to fascist rhetoric just a few weeks ago let a comment comparing protests on college campuses to the rise of Nazism go unchecked. But I guess trivializing something horrible is only bad when it’s someone you disagree with.

[Duruss]

Speaking of the playbook heres a link. We are only at undermine the fr?e press at this point, but getting close to militias? Plus there where the threats to make HiS laws legal, not sure where to place that.

https://robertreich.org/post/746577742119731201

[Fuzz]

PP has openly said(in his cowardly way) he'll use the notwithstanding clause to do what he wants, courts and laws be damned. What do we call that?

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by Cowboy89

All it tells you is that a poster is clearly deeply partisan or anti-conservative and offers nothing of value.

"I lack the ability and/or substance to debate the evidence of fascism offered by the poster, so I'm going to resort to an ad hominem to avoid any uncomfortable self-reflections regarding who I support politically."

[rubecube]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Fascism has a concrete and specific definition

What's your concrete and specific definition of fascism, Cliff?

[timun]

Originally Posted by rubecube

What's your concrete and specific definition of fascism, Cliff?

Yes, I'd love to know.

[timun]

Copied from another thread:

Originally Posted by timun

"Modern social conservatives" are fascists. I don't know why we pussyfoot around this anymore: they're fascists.

Umberto Eco's 14 essential characteristics of fascism:

1. The cult of tradition.
"One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements."

2. The rejection of modernism.
"The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism."

3. The cult of action for action's sake.
"Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."

4. Disagreement is treason.
"The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge."

5. Fear of difference.
"The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."

6. Appeal to social frustration.
"One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups."

7. The obsession with a plot.
"The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia."

8. The humiliation by the wealth and force of their enemies.
"By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."

9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
"For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle."

10. Contempt for the weak.
"Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology."

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero.
"In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death."

12. Machismo and weaponry.
"Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."

13. Selective populism.
"There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People."

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
"All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."

There's my baseline; very curious what CliffFletcher's is.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by rubecube

What's your concrete and specific definition of fascism, Cliff?

You’re the one making the claims of fascism (or neo-fascism, or pre-fascism, or however you want to couch it), so how about you go first?

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

You’re the one making the claims of fascism (or neo-fascism, or pre-fascism, or however you want to couch it), so how about you go first?

Guess that concrete and specific definition was a little trickier to find than you thought.

Oh well!

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by timun

Copied from another thread:



There's my baseline; very curious what CliffFletcher's is.

Most of those are right-wing populism. It’s fascism in the same way social democracy is communism; it isn’t, but people who fear the former will warn that it’s just a waystation on the inevitable road to the latter.

Then there are key ones like the racial essentialist, blood and belonging stuff. Who exactly is Poillievre going to appeal to as the True Blooded Canadians? Anglo-Saxons, who make up less than a quarter of the population of the country today? Christian Europeans, who are around half? How popular do you really think a white nationalist movement would be in today’s Canada?

Here’s a list of actual fascist regimes in history. It’s not a long list, and none of them are more recent than 50 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fascist_movements

Do you guys really think Poillievre is going to make the Conservative party the only legitimate source of authority in Canada, introduce a police state, ban elections, quash all alternatives sources of news and information (including sites like this), unleash thugs in the streets to beat all dissenters, compel military service, and subordinate Canadian society to a cult of personality built around him?

If you don’t believe that, then use a more accurate term for what you fear (right-wing populism is the obvious one). But don’t dilute and diminish the awfulness of fascism by broadening its definition so much that it loses most of its meaning.

If you do believe he’ll do all that stuff (and aren’t just posturing on social media), then I genuinely pity you. And I don’t mean that rhetorically. It must be awful to live in your head.

[powderjunkie]

Fascism: what fascists do.

Fascist: someone who does the fascism.

[Locke]

I'm not going to get into it too, too much, but I think we also have to understand that Fascism today ain't your Grand-Pappy's Fascism.

I know everyone loves their beloved little 'Political Line' but life isn't that easily defined. Things change.

Modern Fascism does not necessarily have to conform to 1930s standards or what was learned in a Jr. High Textbook.

Politics, on all ends of the spectrum, are fluid and change according to the times and we as the Electorate have to change with them.

France, Italy and Sweden are staring at pretty 'out there' Governments and most of Eastern Europe is almost a complete write-off already.

We have to expand our understanding.

"Know thine Enemy."