There were two ridiculous manufactured controversies in Canada last week. They were completely unrelated yet they both reveal the same characteristic of the partisan Liberal/ideologically Left-wing mindset.
The first was a video of the Premiere of Alberta Danielle Smith that was shared widely on social media. The second was the reaction from Liberal partisans to criticism of the redesign of the Canadian passport.
The video of Smith from 2021 was dug up and posted on social media by a user under the Twitter handle ‘disordered. The text that accompanied the clip instructed opponents of Smith’s government on how they were to interpret her words. It said: “Danielle Smith equates the 75% of the public who got vaccinated with those who followed Hitler.”
Of course, this is a deliberately misleading representation of what she said and the point she was making.
In the video, Smith is seen on a podcast addressing the Covid restrictions and mandates which were in full swing at the time. She references a Netflix series called How to Become a Tyrant and she says:
“...it starts with Hitler in the first episode and it's absolutely appalling and shocking. And one academic says — they must have filmed this before COVID — so many people say that they would not have succumbed to the charms of the tyrants, somebody telling them that they have all the answers... and this academic said, 'I guarantee they would.'”
She then relates the social phenomenon of succumbing to the charms of tyrants to the situation under Covid controls:
“And that's the test here. We've seen it, we have 75% of the public who say not only ‘hit me’ but ‘hit me harder’ and keep me away from those dirty unvaxxed. And even on the cover of the Toronto Star saying, 'I want people who aren’t vaxxed to get sick and die, and I don’t even care. I don't want them to get treatment.' We’re already hearing about people being denied treatment or not being vaccinated being taken off the organ donor list. What are we becoming?”
Smith isn’t “equating” Canadians to “followers of Hitler”. She is raising the issue of reflexive mass conformity and compliance in times of authoritarian rule.
What she said about the conduct of much of the public, the media and the medical establishment is objectively true. But Smith’s reference to these objective facts was excluded from her critics’ account of her remarks.
It is also important to acknowledge that the point about mass behaviours re-emerging in the COVID era which were previously observed in times of authoritarian control has been widely identified and discussed. It’s not as if this is some far-out conception that has uniquely occurred in the mind of Danielle Smith. Entire books have been written on the subject in the last three years including Mattias Desmet’s The Psychology of Totalitarianism in which he explores the phenomenon of ‘mass formation’ and Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others.
Having said that, if your perception of the events of the last three years is limited to the official narrative as projected by the mainstream media then the video with Smith is probably your first encounter with these ideas.
It shouldn’t be surprising then to find that people who internalized the messaging about morally superior ‘vaccinated’ citizens vs “selfish” ignorant “antivaxxers” are less than receptive to finding themselves characterized as swept up in mass enthrallment to tyrannical power.
One of the things that was so fascinating about the reaction to Smith's words was that it took the form of - ‘How dare she say that about us!’ – as opposed to grappling with her point. Of course this is the entire purpose of misrepresenting what she said. The intention is to give Ms. Smith's opponents maximum justification to vent their righteous indignation and to denounce her as contemptable. There is no intention whatsoever to understand her point of view or examine its validity. This tactic has the added appeal of circumventing any responsibility to honestly examine their own conduct during this period.
This is where we see a common theme with the reaction from extreme partisan Liberals to criticism of the passport redesign.
The criticism was primarily directed at the decision to replace representations of various touchstones from Canadian history with banal generic imagery of squirrels and snowflakes.
Partisan Liberals reacted with disproportionate outrage by accusing critics of the redesign of indulging in disproportionate outrage.
They characterized critics as holding an imbecilic belief that passports are intended to teach history. The opportunity to jump on the ‘We’re so much smarter than those people’ bandwagon motivated many to parrot a patronizing mantra about how their appreciation of history wasn’t dependent on the imagery in the passport.
The problem is that these characterizations of the criticism of the redesign had nothing to do with the actual perspective of the critics.
The objection was to the deliberate removal of deeply resonant historic imagery which critics associated with the trend of denigrating and diminishing Canadian history in general.
This is far from a baseless concern.
The last few years have seen statues of historic Canadian figures toppled without repercussion or replacement. The first Prime Minster of the country was unceremoniously removed from the currency. Schools named after people who were responsible for creating the society their detractors are benefiting from have been renamed. Major thoroughfares with names that generations of Canadians have grown up with and identified with their home town are being changed to pacify a tiny number of entitled, self-righteous activists.
All of this is occurring under the rule of a federal government led by a Prime Minister who has openly stated his conception of Canada as an intrinsically racist and even genocidal nation. Justin Trudeau has made his disdain for the very idea of a Canadian culture or identity absolutely clear. He has stated his ideological commitment to the concept of Canada as a “post-national state”.
The bureaucrats in charge of the redesign signaled their compliance to Liberal Party ideological ideals by citing ‘progressive’ buzzwords like ‘inclusion and ‘diversity’ as motivations for the changes.
The Toronto Star published an op ed proclaiming the previous passport’s “excessive focus on a narrow set of overused European-Canadian-centric symbols” to be “problematic” and questioned whether the historic figures and events depicted “still matter”.
In other words, the criticism of the changes to the passport are grounded in sincere concerns about a broader, seemingly deliberate pattern of devaluing Canadian history. They see the government’s cavalier replacement of meaningful historic touchstones with meaningless generic images as another manifestation of that process.
You can debate that perspective if you so choose. But that isn’t what the people who are attacking critics of the redesign are doing.
Instead of grappling with this perspective in an intellectually honest and respectful manner, they are manufacturing wildly absurd straw man arguments.
Just as with the Danielle Smith video, their reflex is to misrepresent their opponents’ point of view and to use that misrepresentation to smear them and proclaim themselves enlightened and exceptionally clever by comparison.
Attacking their opponents with logically fallacious arguments while announcing the superiority of their own reasoning is a peculiar way to approach political disagreement. The self-contradiction is glaring.
If they're so certain of the superiority of their position and reasoning, why don’t they directly engage their opponent's point of view?
Going to Getugly on
