Blog 8 Canadians Are Using the F-word!

                                    

 

 Blog #8    Canadians Are Using the F-Word ! 

No, no, not that F-word! 

A recent article in the CCPA  MONITOR, by respected Editor Emeritus, Ed Finn, used a more daring F-word. Title: “Fascism spreading in the U.S.  Will it spill over into Canada?” (Nov 2014, pp 38-39)  Highly recommended reading.

The word fascism came from classical Latin, fasces, which meant a bundle of sticks that was carried before a magistrate as a symbol of power. But the 1930’s regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy put the word into the vocabulary of modern political scientists. 

Finn recalls his own occasional use of it in recent years, then paraphrases fourteen points defining a fascist regime from Laurence Britt, and concludes that “there is evidence of all of these traits thriving in the US, and it’s clear some of them - especially the glorification of the military, suppression of unions, disdain of intellectuals, and obsession with crime and punishment - have greatly increased in Canada, too.” I would have added fraudulent elections, or the attempt thereat, given a recent Canadian scandal about telephone calls directing electors to false polling centres. And maybe something about the use of government money for political propaganda..

I did use the word myself in a privately circulated piece in 2011 when the Conservative government in Canada got their majority. I concluded that future Canadian historians would probably call this period neo-Fascist.

I will take another tilt at this topic in the next blog. Hope you will forgive me for a temporary shift from money to politics, but they are as closely meshed as a set of bevel gears.