Prorogation protest again, eh? I notice that the media is trying to keep legs under this paid holiday Harper is giving those hard working parliamentarians we send to Ottawa to sort out the people’s business. But this is the wrong prorogation. This one doesn’t matter. When the IOC has finished spreading the gold around the Olympics and the politicians have absorbed the extraneous stardust available standing next to the real Olympians, they will all return to the same old situation in dreary old Ottawa. Afghanistan will have ground up more soldiers and spit out some more tortured prisoners; Harper will stack the senate to better strong-arm a parliament that he now effectively manipulates through division; he will have ‘reset’ his budget in a back room despite having been told by the governor general to work with parliament, something he never intended to do.

Why should he? He won. When he prorogued the house last winter to avoid losing power to a cooperating majority of elected members in the house, the public did not rise in the streets to take back their democracy. He knew he had us in the bag. He became king. He has no need to stand around back there in that stuffy house in the snow and the rain, dealing with all the messy little issues that are beginning to squish out through the toes of the corporate dictatorship that the Conservative party set to plodding through our “Just Society” of social economics and our once pristine reputation as arbiters of world peace.

Dictators that rise to power, as opposed to taking power in a coup or placed in power by some colonising corporation or country (for example, Haiti in 2004), do so with the complicity of the populations that they purport to serve. Stalin ensured that only he was left to serve after arranging the destruction through careful manipulation of his supposed friends and colleagues. He was loved, not because of his oration or alluring personality, but because, in the end, if one did not love him it might be discovered and result in dispatch to the gulag for yourself and your family. Hitler was elected by a loyal populace and subsequently arranged to have his opposition gradually disappear. “I didn’t object when they came for the Jews because I wasn’t a Jew”, etc. Mussolini was loved as were Pol Pot in Cambodia and Marcos in the Philippines. They rise on charisma to positions of power and then, through the manipulation of crises, assume authoritarian control. Harper seems to have risen in a power vacuum and then shifted directly to manipulating the system.

So what now? Will we recognise the loss of our constitutional democracy and the false crises which are used by shrewd leaders to weaken it? If we do will we rise so save it, or continue to stagger into this dark night in the political wilderness? “Don’t worry”, Flaherty tells us, “We are now in a ‘jobless recovery.’ Our banks are strong. We just have to have the people tighten their belts a little more.” It seems we are begrudgingly willing to get a little hungrier to save corporate Canada. We are told that the answer to terrorism is, not to reduce disparity of income or respect the independence of others, it is to undergo a full body scan that ensures that there are no explosives up the skirt of the silver-gray snowbird off to Florida.

I always believed that the live-in-fear attitude would at some point get old and we would stop being suspicious of our neighbours. The Russian experience 1918 to ‘80s seems to suggest that this is not so and that this state of fear can become a life style; submission to authority of any sort becomes the norm and is in fact welcomed. Stalin told his security service that he had lost his pipe. Two hours later when he informed them that he had found it in his boot they had arrested eight people and seven had confessed.

In the last week of January a meeting of the defence staffs of 63 of the world’s most heavily armed countries, including the bulk of the nuclear powers, was held at NATO headquarters in Brussels. This meeting formalized strategies by which the world’s police force under the direction of the US and the auspices of the UN would manage an expanding war in South Asia. They moved to London two days later to apply that policy at a conference on Afghanistan. It is, after stripping away the platitudes about “Afghan led” and “regional cooperation,” essentially a council of war. Who from the free world will rise to argue?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson

John Hill has worked as a bush pilot for over 35 years and has come to know, as a result, the rural community of Canada. This has produced a fascination with the diverse and unique systems of cooperative, largely consensus based governance displayed by these communities and an insatiable drive to figure out how to defend them against the onslaught of corporate governance.

Opinions expressed in this column will usually be those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Shingle. We welcome your comments, observations, compliments, and insights.

Namaste,

The Waging Wordsmiths