UCP apologists clutch their pearls about premier’s ‘fascist pancakes’

Let those on the right who have never engaged in gratuitous name calling be the first to cast stones here.

That would eliminate a lot of the hypocrisy and hysteria here.
For instance, this would include most of those who have ever called those they oppose communists.

Unfortunately history shows Fascists can sometimes get into power democratically. The problem is they then use that power to bully others, take away rights from people, often scapegoating minorities and also undermining democratic institutions and processes to stay in power. They are also very quick to shift from bully to victim mode when challenged. Does any of this sound familiar?

Interestingly, the main response here by the UCP and its supporters is not so much a strong defense of why they are not fascists, but that it is very bad for others to call them that.

Functional Fascist … sounds like good title for an unauthorized biography of Smith.

The same title could be applied to Harper, with the difference that the Canadian electorate decided to turf him.

As for the knicker twisted neo-cons – looking at you Kenney – stones & glass houses. You know the rest. Deal with it.

FASCISM!!! The fascination is ancient and never-ending, presently a bundling of pearl-clutching, anti-semantic trivia-gridlock. The key is the ligature, symbol of law; the lock is the irony, hypocrisy, contradiction, and oxymoronic absurdity of the fasces, or bundle of “rods” symbolizing the tribute-payers to the state, symbolized in its turn as two battle-axes. The original symbolized the severity of the Ancient Roman magistrate, the consul, and was borne by his lictors, or bodyguards, as they comported from domicile to court to bathhouse through the beating and beaten hearts of the Roman state, the servile class, or slaves.

If the ligature is severed at any place on its length, the bundle falls apart, which supposes the axes are thence deployed to corral and lasso order back together. Naturally the ideal is that the ligature may not, if not cannot, ever be broken. The irony is that self-styled fascists—yes, like Danielle Smith’s UCP—allow themselves transcendence of the very law they insist must be severely obeyed. In America they call it “exceptionalism”—and that has caché in Texas North.

The term and concept revives perennially from its ancient tribal roots, mytho-historically portrayed as a pact between closely neighbouring peoples that stipulates mutual defence against outsiders, an alliance that promises punishment for any hint of secession. In Alberta, the fascists mean, ‘any secession from the secessionist movement.’ Contradictory? D’accord.

I’ve often alluded to the circled Wagon Laager, a kind of fasces that binds defenders against the surround of perceived or fabulated adversaries that deals with backsliders with the utmost stricture—which seems as apropos to me as it probably does for the hardy pioneers on the bald prairie, as seen Hollywood westerns ‘n’ all other, more current forms of influencer. Moderate Tories trapped by circumstance in radicalized “conservative” parties are thus cowed (perhaps especially in Calgary).

It was revived in Fascist Italy, of course, where Il Duce plastered fasces on everything from postage stamps, money, lamp-standards, flags, medals, &c. But the trivia with which the Jimmy Kimmel Show loves to embarrass ordinary American passersby —for example, identifying nations, or even US states, on an unlabeled map—would be as comical with regard the ubiquity of fasces on US government buildings, courthouses, bridges, and monuments in too many places to count, including those motifs erected after WWII when, as at least most Americans should know, US and allied soldiers were maimed or killed fighting Fascism in Italy. Like, ask any passerby on any US street what fasces are, where they are in the USA, and why. Asking too much? It’s a lazy surveyor’s dream.

Let’s allude, then, to one of Kimmel’s gags where an older middle-aged man stopped on the street is asked to identify France on an unlabelled map of the world; after failing a couple of times, he finally grumps that all he needs to know is he’s American and therefore doesn’t need to know where France is—or, presumably, anywhere else on “the outside.”

Fascism depends on “The Other” as scapegoat material, but insofar as it always has territorial, or meta-frontier aspirations, it always encounters the conundrum of its inevitable demise: it can only work in a highly idealized and racially uniform realm, requiring the exile, extermination, enslavement or persecution of “the others” who happen to pre-occupy the desired “living room”—or in Nazi mythology, “Lebensraum.” (Communist Soviets balked at calling Nazis by the full name, National Socialist Workers Party because, naturally, Nazis were the opposite of socialists and by “workers” they often meant slaves; Soviets therefore always called them “Fascists”—even as Stalin used statist “law”—or ligature— to enslave and execute his own “workers”).

Roman fascism ideally could not allow citizenship for tribal peoples in regions it conquered outside the Latin realm, leading of course to a series of “Samnite,” “Social,” and “Civil” wars that busted —or transcended—the fascist ideal. Naturally a pan-chronologist of Ancient Rome would tut-tut that while granting broad citizenship to nonRoman Italians was a prudent compromise, but federating Germanic tribes was a big, big mistake. Points of view change, as citizens of UK, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania and other post-imperial realms which shaped the modern nations of Europe, whence many of our ancestors came to the New World, would attest: germane to their germination were the Germanic Gothic, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon and other tribes who aspired to the symbolic toga—but without Italian ligature (cƒ Germanic kinglets of the collapsing empire styled themselves “free”—whence “Frank”—but not free enough to intermarry with supposedly effeminate Roman citizens). Plainly Fascism doesn’t work for long and withers under a series of hypocrisies, ironies, and finally capitulation—sexual intercourse more weighty than any other forbidden by fascistic ideal.

In 1789 the USA became a federated constitutional democracy. The decoration of fasces upon bastardized ‘Greco-Roman’ architecture symbolized the bundle of rods—in reality, truncheons, clubs, or shillelaghs, the weaponry of country folk—deemed necessary to defend against Britain and Spain, just so long’s the boss wielded the axes (nota bene the huge fasces bookending the Speaker’s podium in the US House of Representatives, for example). US Independence qualified as fascistic: indigenous nations were to be exterminated or exiled for a quarter millennium (including the colonial era), non-Protestant Europeans relegated to the servile class, and way-outsiders—Africans—enslaved. The USA’s founding document wasn’t hypocritical at the time, it was idiotic by design—that is, the initiate Anglo-white Protestant was, as a ligatured group, alone, on its own (cƒ “id”—instinctive impulses of the individual alone; “idiot”—Donald F tRump—alone, by himself, symptomatically devoid of empathy, purely tactical, uncooperative, selfish, &c); however, even Benjamin Franklin doubted a federation based on fascism could ever work (notably, modern fascists ran unitary states; Alberta secessionists—although styled above as “annexationists”—loath federalism. Only the tourniqueted, cystic pustule can ever power the mytho-requisite sallying explosion of vengeance they want).

Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin identified the “fascist regime” against which their Yippie movement fought, as did Johnny Rotten’s “God Save The Queen.” Yeah, we get it: fascism revives so often throughout history it has to be anticipated at any given point. Umberto Eco was never more quoted (his 14 criteria of fascism) than when tRump took the stage. Texas North, Buffalo-Maverick-Wexit-Smith&Parker Gang—okay, okay, nuff said.

Aside from the suffering fascism causes, I am nowadays often—too often, I’m afraid—reminded how it affects me personally: my old man returned from WWII a damaged soul about which he seldom spoke, and even then, very little. But I recall like yesterday when he probably let slip, almost sotto voce, the utter destruction he saw from the air when that horror was finally over—the shooting part; he whispered that the RCAF moved a lot of materiel and people around immediately following the Nazi surrender—and he saw Berlin completely, mind-blowingly, bogglingly reduced to rubble, and worse, the newly liberated inmates from the Death Laagers reduced to emaciated bags of bones. My wife recalls refugee kids introduced into her grade school class, the gaunt, emancipated frames but, most of all, the look in their eyes, the look of fear: “we knew they were from the camps.” She still tears up at the memory so long suppressed.

If “fascism” were possibly encapsulated in a single definition, I think it would be something like these. We only wonder how it could ever not never happen again.

Human nature seems fascistic, human progress outgrows it, it dies by violence, the destruction wrought is never worth it. Time and again through all discernible history and prehistory the necessity appears prudent, the result, through fermentation and percolation and procrastination, always proves otherwise. It should never be a faux pas to call it out, pancakes and all. It has always failed but, if unfortunate enough, exists long enough to burn the house down.

That’s how we define fascism.