Stephen Harper and the Battle for Canada

Two months from today, if the budget is defeated according to schedule, Stephen Harper could be celebrating his first day in power as head of a majority government. And preparing to destroy the Canada we love.

So I am glad to see that Michael Ignatieff is playing up the threat to our democracy.

Ignatieff said he plans to make what he called the PM’s secretive and authoritarian ways a major issue of an election campaign.

“I’ll tell you that out there, outside the central bubble of Ottawa, this is, in many ways, the central indictment of Harperism. The central reason why Canadians don’t trust him with another government is that they don’t trust him with power,” he said.

And that some in the MSM are finally calling a dictator a dictator. Or Big Brother.

George Orwell, wintry conscience of the English language, said that the great enemy of clear language was insincerity. “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” one turns one’s claws on language. Harper has always been a spiteful man, a yeller at work who was forced to tone it down in public.

But he cannot help himself. The terrorizing of officials and the rewriting of language are revealing the malevolence that lies beneath Harper’s hair. It is ungood, to use Orwell’s Newspeak. It is crimethink.

But why I wonder did it take so many, so long to recognize the danger? 

Five years ago, when I had just started blogging, I wrote the following post. It's just a film review. It's a bit young and stoopid. And the formatting is all screwed up. 

But at least I felt the same back then as I do today.

I'm so fucking angry about having had to spend so much time and energy fighting the right-wing hordes over the years. And their crazy creepy visions of a neocon world. I'm sick and tired of seeing them slash social programs and victimize the weakest members of society like the poor, the homeless, single mothers and children. Just to make their rich friends richer. I'm tired of their bloody so called wars on terror for power and oil. Sick of the way they're torching the planet, their campaigns of fear, their torture,and their lies.

And of course, I'm burning molten mad at finding myself in the 21st Century having to fight off legions of medieval wingnuts trying to steal my rights.Trying to make my life, and the lives of my brothers and sisters, even more of a living hell of stinking prejudice and bigotry. I'm tired of having to battle them with my pen and my fists. But I'll do whatever I have to do, for as long as it takes, to make sure that we win and they lose.

At least unlike so many in our corporate media, who were too busy calling him a political genius. Or all those in the blogosphere who thought it couldn't happen here.

I ALWAYS knew that Stephen Harper would take us to a dark place...

And at least even though five years of the Harper Regime have ground me down, like so many other progressives, I still believe more strongly than ever in these words:

"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

Not the other way around, as the bully Harper would have it, because he's a maniac, and that's NOT democracy.

What I have learned is that if we are going to defeat these totalitarian Cons we have to keep the message simple and powerful. We have to stop fighting each other, and join forces and generations to save our democratic system.

We have to get more young Canadians to vote. We have to make sure that ALL Canadians get the message.

And above all we must not give up. More Canadians really should have known where a political thug like Harper would take us. But it's still not too late.

Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to defeat those scummy Cons.  

Fight them, fight them, fight them.

Don't let them WIN...

Recommend this post at Progressive Bloggers.