Prime Time Crime
(Published in the Chilliwack Times week of Nov. 15, 2010)
Here a Nazi, there a Nazi
By John Martin
I have a confession to make. I've been going through withdrawal for a few months. I admit it. I miss True Blood.
Sure, the last episode of season three of the campy vampire show kind of sucked, but I am getting more than anxious waiting for what's next for Sookie, Bill and the rest of them. You could say I'm hooked.
So it was quite a relief to see all that blood-letting in the recent US midterm elections. If that were an ultimate fighting match they would have stopped it for excessive bleeding. What a slaughter.
While it was gratifying to see such a wholesale repudiation of Obama's socialist agenda, what made it all the more satisfying was the extent to which the desperate Democrats' slander didn't stick. Lacking any new ideas or the ability to engage in intelligent debate or informed dialogue, they simply referred to everyone and anyone who didn't support Obama as a Nazi. Media commentators, still obediently and overwhelmingly in the tank for Obama, routinely portrayed Tea Partiers as Nazi thugs and brownshirts. The only thing rarer than a smiling Democrat in recent weeks was a Republican campaign poster that hadn't been defaced with a Hitler mustache.
This seems to be the last refuge for liberals these days--attempt to dismiss those who disagree with you as Hitler wannabes.
This is not simply an American phenomenon where politics are typically much more vicious than they are here.
This act of inexcusable desperation is a common occurrence on the Canadian scene as well. And shameful as it is, it appears there's no end in sight.
Just two weeks ago, NDP MLA Leonard Krog, who I long thought was a reasonable and decent public figure, compared Liberal Social Development Minister Kevin Krueger to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Krog actually made the public statement that Krueger was filling the same role for Premier Gordon Campbell as Goebbels did for Hitler.
To his credit, Krog did eventually apologize. But what is someone who could stoop to such vulgarity doing in the legislature?
Ron McKinnon, past federal Liberal candidate and the president of the Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam riding association, compared the Conservative government's plans to target human smuggling to collaboration with the Nazis a couple months ago.
"This brave new policy is sordidly familiar, akin to collaborating with the Nazis to stop the flight of Jews," McKinnon wrote.
These are hardly isolated incidents. A while back Green Party leader Elizabeth May compared the federal government's approach to climate change to Britain's appeasement of the Nazis.
Now that the science behind climate change has been challenged and in some cases, exposed as out and out fraud, die hard supporters increasingly equate those who don't bow down for Al Gore and David Suzuki to Holocaust deniers. My, my, aren't we tolerant and progressive.
Former Liberal Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan routinely referred to the opposition and their supporters as Holocaust deniers as well and Jean Chretien would simply chuckle in his seat.
The people who engage in this type of vitriolic slander not only show their intellectual and moral bankruptcy, but they minimize and trivialize one of the most significant horrors in history.
They are truly pathetic.
John Martin is a Criminologist at the University of the Fraser Valley and can be contacted at John.Martin@ucfv.ca