Larry Miller Needs to Stop Quoting the NRA and Ezra Levant Just Needs to STOP!

Last week, Conservative MP Larry Miller, compared support for the gun registry to Adolf Hitler and his apparent disarming of Germans.

Most people were shocked but they shouldn't have been.  The NRA uses this argument all the time and before they pried the gun from his "cold, dead hands", Charlton Heston declared:  "Any of the monsters of modern history such as Hitler and Stalin-confiscated privately held firearms as their first act."  Wayne R. LaPierre, the current executive vice president and chief executive officer of the NRA, similarly highlights the link between gun registration, confiscation, and the German experience." (1)

Miller uses his NRA material to challenge the statement that the conservative movement is determined to socially re-engineer Canadians.  Maybe instead of reading the American Rifleman, Miller should read a bit of history on his boss.  Tom Flanagan claimed that Stephen Harper wrote the Reform Party's policies on guns and only stopped short at calling it "a right to bear arms".

Scrapping the gun registry is being seen by the gun lobby as only an important first step.  They firmly believe that if we all carried guns there would be less crime.

I watched an interesting documentary Gun Fight, and in it Diane Sawyer, after receiving so many emails that if students could carry guns the Virginia Tech tragedy would never have happened, she challenged gun enthusiasts to prove it.

Recreating the scene, when the gunman came into view, those involved couldn't even get their weapons out in time.  The shooter had the element of surprise.  Had others been armed, I think there would have simply been more deaths.

Miller claims that his comments were taken out of context, but I'm curious just how he would like us to take them.

Then of course, Ezra Levant, tiring of performing his impersonation of an owl on crack, for Sun TV, decided to pen (type, scratch?)  his support for Miller.  Under the heading: Censoring Hitler — and the Past, he gives one of the most convoluted history lessons, using not only gun control, but free speech and concern for human rights; as ingredients for a return to Nazi tyranny.

However, Levant does not blame Hitler, but  "do-gooders" and the Treaty of Versailles.

The Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1918 and covered military disarmament.  The gun control law was passed a decade later, in 1928, by the Weimar Republic, to deal with the civil unrest after the war.

The Weimar government was attempting to bring some stability to German society and politics.   Violent extremist movements of both the Left and Right, were actively attacking the young, and very fragile, democratic state. A government that cannot maintain some degree of public order cannot sustain its legitimacy ... Gun control was not initiated at the behest or on behalf of the Nazis - it was in fact designed to keep them, or others of the same ilk, from executing a revolution against the lawful government. In the strictest sense, the law succeeded - the Nazis did not stage an armed coup. (2)

In 1938, the Nazis extended the gun control act, but by then they were firmly in control of Germany.

Levant's claim that attempts to silence Hitler had created the volatile anti-Jewish movement, are just as inaccurate.  I've written of this before.  It was actually the fact that the courts continued to rule in his favour, that accelerated the hatred and emboldened the Brown Shirts.

Sun media may be in dire need of a fact checker, but they also need a little reality check.  Levant's verbal attack on Irwin Cotler is not only unfair but untrue.

Mr. Cotler is a well respected human rights lawyer, who can count amoung his clients, Nelson Mandela,  Jacobo Timmerman and Muchtar Pakpahan.  Cotler also represented Natan Sharansky, who was imprisoned in the Soviet gulag for Jewish activism. After his release, Sharansky went on to become the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister. (3)

Ezra Levant sings to the choir of the deaf on his television program, and now attempts to write for the wilfully blind. 

As for Miller, he's obviously auditioning for a spot on the Friends of the NRA television program.  Maybe Winchester will throw a few bucks his way too.

1. CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON GUN REGISTRATION, THE NRA, ADOLF HITLER, AND NAZI GUN LAWS: EXPLODING THE GUN CULTURE WARS (A CALL TO HISTORIANS), by Bernard E. Harcourt, Fordham Law Review, Volume 73, Issue 2, Article 11, January 1, 2004

2. The Myth of Nazi Gun Control, by N. A. Brown, GunCite, July 21, 2001

3. Wikipedia

The Politics of Obscurantism: Next You Control the Message

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

"His full conquest of the masses came only after [he] had silenced oppositional opinion and had acquired total control of the media." Konrad Heiden (1)

The next component of Obscurantism, a concept that a friend suggested I explore, is message control. I've covered most of these things before but was amazed at how well they fit with this definition. So if you feel uncomfortable calling Stephen Harper a Fascist, call him an Obscurantist. Both fit.

In the pragmatic exposé of Stephen Harper, in his new book Harperland, Lawrence Martin devotes a chapter to Harper's "control fixation". But control is a key element of neoconservatism, as espoused by Leo Strauss.

According to Martin:

The PMO was in the course of putting in place a message-control system, a vetting operation unlike anything ever seen in the capital. No other government had even come close to such a system of oversight.

The new regimen called for all public pronouncements by civil servants, diplomats, the military, cabinet members, and Conservative MPs to be approved by the Prime Minister's Office or its bureaucratic arm, the Privy Council Office (PCO). The vetting was by no means a quick rubber-stamping procedure. If a government official or a caucus member wanted to say something publicly, he or she would first have to fill out a Message Event Proposal (MEP) and submit it to central command. This form had sections with such titles as Desired Headline, Strategic Objective, Desired Sound Bite, and the like. It also had areas for supplying details on the speaking backdrop, the ideal event photograph, and even the speaker's wardrobe.

Once submitted, the MEP was studied by PMO and PCO officials, often bouncing back and forth between apparatchiks before getting final approval. Some MEPs required less vetting than others, but the massive centralization caused logjams, delays, and in some cases, cancellation of planned events because the requester never heard back in time. Keith Beardsley recalled even events for cabinet ministers being derailed. "Every communications director for every minister was trying to get stuff through. Their ministers wanted to do things," he said. But "because of the backlog [sometimes an event] got delayed and delayed and it was cancelled." In the past, while there was sonic vetting, departments produced their own news releases and scheduled events for ministers independently. Under Harper, such freedom was not allowed. (2)　

Time Magazine 1936:

Because Adolf Hitler's speeches may be used to prove almost anything, the Nazi Commission of Inspection of Nazi Literature announced that Hitler's speeches may not be quoted in print hereafter without the Commission's express permission. Hearing that the rebellious pastors of the German Evangelical [Lutheran] Church plan to print and circulate privately their unanswered protest to the Reichsführer against practically everything going on in Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (secret police) raided Confessional Synod offices, lugged off typewriters, mimeograph and printing machines. (3)

"Such freedom was not allowed".

The German version of the "Message Event proposal" was handled by Philipp Bouhler, who was "the Chairman of the Official Party Inspection Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature, which determined what writings were suitable for Nazi society, and which were not." (4)

Before you can even hope to set up a system of obscuring the message, you have to be able to control the message. And Stephen Harper incrementally created a system whereby he controls every word that comes out of the mouths of not only his caucus, especially his ministers, but the public service as well.

And the media has become so conditioned to this, that they rarely question it. Matthew Brett wrote recently for Global Research:

Not surprisingly, the Globe and Mail and other news organizations ran a press release from the PMO's office verbatim, with no critical commentary, analysis or insight. The state of media today is such that copy-pasting a press release from the PMO and slapping it on the front page of a national daily newspaper is accepted practice. Indeed, Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan writes that “compared to most countries with which I have any familiarity, the Conservatives in Canada actually have friendly media to work with.” The ‘Propaganda Model’ is more than alive and well, but sometimes without even bothering to ‘filter’ news content. (5)

The Conservatives in Canada have friendly media to work with, or just lazy media. Either way they should be ashamed. And this certainly contradicts their stance that the media is out to get them.

But besides just writing their own copy, the Conservatives now also take their own photos. After an image was published and incorrectly labelled as an actual event, Steven Chase wrote:

Since the spring [of 2009], the PMO has effectively set up its own picture service, e-mailing photos to Canadian media almost daily in an effort to find a market for publicity shots of Mr. Harper's activities. It's a service that ultimately competes with the work of photojournalists, but one, they argue, that should not be relied upon as a record of events. (6)

And they didn't stop at providing photos, but now also provide videos.

Taxpayers are being asked to pay an extra $1.7-million this fiscal year to help bolster Stephen Harper's communications support services – just as the Prime Minister's Office begins distributing government videos of Harper to the news media. Supplementary estimates tabled last month by the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister's bureaucratic back office, boosted internal operational spending by almost $7.3-million for 2009-10. That's on top of existing budgets. (7)

By doing things in small steps, the public remains mostly unaware that everything they see and hear from our government, as reported by the press, is staged for our amusement. But when you look at the big picture, that's when it becomes frightening.

Sometimes the media, and pundits, must feel the hairs on the back of their necks stand up, so they will dismiss it by suggesting that other prime ministers have done this. But as Lawrence Martin says, it's: "... a vetting operation unlike anything ever seen in the capital. No other government had even come close to such a system of oversight."

"No other government had even come close." Worth repeating.

By dismissing this, journalists and columnists are only creating an enabling condition that further threatens our democracy, which is already hanging on by a thread.

Previous:

The Politics of Obscurantism: First You Obstruct

Sources:

1. Der Fhehrer, Hitler's Rise to Power, By: Konrad Heiden, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944

2. Harperland:The Politics of Control, By Lawrence Martin, Viking Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-670-06517-2, Pg. 58

3. GERMANY: Tyranny, Time Magazine, August 03, 1936

4. Philipp Bouhler - Wikipedia

5. Canadian Politics: The Newly Benevolent Stephen Harper, By Matthew Brett, Global Research, March 14, 2010

6. Is Stephen Harper going too far in trying to control his image? By Steven Chase, Globe and Mail, November 06, 2009

7. Taxpayers on hook for $1.7-million as PMO rolls out video, By Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press, December 08, 2009

Is Stephen Harper Now Sensitive to Accusations of Fascism?

I wrote recently about the tell tale signs of fascism, that have absolutely nothing to do with the Holocaust, which was a separate and horrible issue.

Our local paper, the Kingston Whig Standard, part of Sun Media, has gone to the right, and one of their pseudo-columnists is Michael Coren, a member of the Civitas Society who once said: "While everything human must be done to find a cure for this plague [Aids], it is hard to deny that the majority of sufferers in North America contracted the disease through perverse sex ... Nobody cared very much about these men and women before AIDS was brought to North America and, frankly, nobody cares very much now."

A real peach.

This week he posted this "Opinion": Columnist's attack on PM is plain dumb. It's a little difficult to follow because he references a column in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, so most in Kingston Ontario, would have no idea what he was talking about.

However, apparently this columnist suggested that Stephen Harper was drifting toward fascism, citing the prorogations and overall assault on democracy. Coren quotes the Halifax Herald piece:

"at what point in the 1930s should Germans or Italians have begun to use those terms and to treat their own governments with distrust and suspicion? Hitler was democratically elected after all -- with a minority government -- and then employed what one commentator calls his 'blend of political acuity, deceptiveness and cunning' to transform Germany's feeble democracy into the murderous Third Reich." ..."At what point did the majority of Germans -- who were not Nazis -- definitively fail to stop him?" he asks "And what should they have one? And how would Canadians recognize a similar moment in our own country, if one should occur?

"I am not saying that Stephen Harper is another Hitler, even in embryo. "But as I watch his masterful and ruthless manipulation of his situation as a minority prime minister, I am certainly struck by his blend of political acuity, deceptiveness and cunning."

Coren disputes this claim with the following argument:

Chretien imposed the voting whip on his backbenchers far more than Harper, Trudeau imposed martial law. Are either of them to be compared to a genocidal murderer? It's an old game played by the extreme and the talentless. "I'm not saying he's a pedophile but ... " Good Lord, it's as disingenuous and tendentious as it is anti-intellectual and plain dumb. I like Beaujolais, Hitler liked Beaujolais, therefore I'm a Nazi?

If this was unusual on the left I'd ignore it. But anybody who has argued any vaguely conservative position will have experienced something similar and it's nothing more than political bullying. We are no more like Hitler, Mr. Cameron, than you are like a good journalist.

Now comparing Harper to Trudeau will only upset Harper's "base", while the rest of us say "I wish", but Coren should have mentioned that when Trudeau imposed martial law it was when the Vice-Premier and Minister of Labour in Quebec, Pierre LaPorte, was kidnapped and killed by the FLQ. It was not for an opportunity to sun himself at a "fake lake", while telling the police to leave vandals alone, so he could justify more than a billion dollars for "security".

Harper turned Toronto into a military zone because of a sickness, not to protect anyone.

Chretien may have whipped his backbenchers, but he did not muzzle them.

And then with this comment: "It's an old game played by the extreme and the talentless. "I'm not saying he's a pedophile but ... "", the first thing that comes to mind is this and the second this. So on this I agree with Coren. The actions of Harper and Stockwell Day represented "the extreme and the talentless."

And if we're talking hyperbole, how about Jason Kenney referring to a protest at York University against Israeli Apartheid, as a pogrom. A violent massacre.

Or Harper profiling and stereotyping Canadian Jews.

Or the latest sabotage of Wikipedia, this time comparing Bilingualism to Nazism.

So Mr. Coren, if you don't want your boy compared to Hitler, tell him to stop acting like him.

The Reform Party and the Poisonous Mushroom

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

Next to Joseph Goebbels, the best Nazi propagandist was a man named Julius Streicher, founder and publisher of Der Stürmer newspaper, which became a central element for Nazi messaging .

A devout anti-communist, he joined the German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation, a group formed in response to the failed German communist revolution of 1918.

And like many Germans at the time, be believed that the Jewish people were working with the Bolsheviks. However, his resulting anti-Semitism did not fit well with the group and he was asked to leave.

Then in 1921, he went to Munich to hear a man speak, who was gaining a reputation as a powerful voice for change.

I had never seen the man before. And there I sat, an unknown among unknowns. I saw this man shortly before midnight, after he had spoken for three hours, drenched in perspiration, radiant. My neighbour said he thought he saw a halo around his head, and I experienced something which transcended the commonplace. (1)

That man was Adolf Hitler, and from that day on, Julias was a devout follower. He marched with Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch and two years later, started his newspaper, with the purpose of promulgating anti-Semitic propaganda. “We will be slaves of the Jew, therefore he must go." Hitler declared that Der Stürmer was his favourite newspaper, and saw to it that each weekly issue was posted for public reading in special glassed-in display cases known as Stürmerkasten".

As a reward for his dedication, when the Nazi party was re-organized in 1925 Streicher was appointed as head of the Bavarian region of Franconia, which included his home town of Nuremberg. His favourite hang out was a local pub called Cafe Blattnersberg, owned by a man named Werner Droege. Streicher and Droege became friends and when war broke out Droege's son Walter, joined the Lutwaffe, fighting for the Third Reich.

The "Education" of Children

While Streicher's newspaper incited hatred against the Jews, another project was more despicable. He published children's books, with an attempt to embed intolerance in young minds. The most popular of these was Der Giftpilz, or the Poisonous Mushroom.

“Look, Franz, human beings in this world are like the mushrooms in the forest. There are good mushrooms and there are good people. There are poisonous, bad mushrooms and there are bad people. And we have to be on our guard against bad people just as we have to be on guard against poisonous mushrooms. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, mother,” Franz replies. “I understand that in dealing with bad people trouble may arise, just as when one eats a poisonous mushroom. One may even die!”

“And do you know, too, who these bad men are, these poisonous mushrooms of mankind?” the mother continued. Franz slaps his chest in pride: “Of course I know, mother! They are the Jews! "

Julias Streicher was tried at Nuremberg after the war and executed on October 1, 1946, but his legacy lived on in the family of his friend Werner Droege. Droege's son would marry a woman named Margot and they had a son named Wolfgang or "Wolfie", born in 1949 in Forchheim, Bavaria.

At the age of eight, he went to live with his grandfather Werner:

Wolfie was entranced by the exploits of Hitler and Streicher. At the age of eight, he resolved that he, too, like his father and like his grandfather, would grow to be a Nazi. (2)

In 1963, after his parents divorce, he arrived in Canada with his mother and younger brother Werner, and in time would get his wish, becoming one of the most powerful neo-Nazi leaders Canada has ever known. And he would also create quite a stir when it was discovered that he was the Ontario policy chair for the newly created Reform Party.

Sources:

1. Testimony of Julius Streicher, Nuremberg Trials, April 26, 1946

2. Web of Hate: Inside Canada's Far Right Network, By Warren Kinsella, 1994, Harper Collins, pg 205