Dr. Dawg

The great Conservative purification ritual

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Whiter than.jpg

The Harper government is out to purify the country—to make it, at least figuratively, immaculate (without stain), or as the cynical might put it, whiter than white.

How else can one interpret all these recent and obviously related initiatives—to revoke the Canadian citizenship of some 1800 individuals, to hunt down suspected war criminals with unheard-of vigour (releasing to the public a rogues’ gallery of off-white alleged miscreants), create massive immigration bottlenecks, and fight a war on crime that amounts these days to picking off stragglers.

Anyone who can’t see in all this a concerted strategy to purify Canada both figuratively and literally is being wilfully blind.

Let’s see what Jason Kenney has to say—the fellow whose own views of certain “ethnics” are somewhat open to question:

A lot of what I’ve done has taken a lot of risks. Issues like political correctness, issues like refugee reform, cultural relativism, the misunderstanding about multiculturalism and so forth, I’ve taken on in a very direct way and I’ve done so, frankly, in part because I’ve had the confidence from my very intense contact with new Canadians that they would support that agenda.

I think my predecessors were terrified that cracking down on the abuse of the asylum system would be misunderstood by new Canadians as being anti-immigrant, or saying that barbaric practices or that ancient hatreds and conflicts are not welcome in Canada would somehow be negatively perceived, or that cracking down on fake immigration marriages and crooked immigration consultants would somehow be misconstrued as being anti immigrant.

As always, it’s hard to quarrel with stopping abuses, chasing down genocidaires and so forth. It’s really a matter of emphasis. And detail as well.

We have no idea, for example, what the people on the list of “war criminals” have actually done. If they’re guilty, of course, toss ‘em out. Same with fraudulent citizenship applications.

But taken as a bundle, the government’s measures appear to go well beyond specifics, towards something like a quasi-religious purification ritual. Knowing the pre-Enlightenment bent of the government—anti-science, anti-statistics—one might well expect precisely that approach. The Other is fair game, not to mention those who merely transgress. Hence the megaprisons, the mandatory sentences, the great gouts of anti-crime legislation when actual crime in Canada is plummeting.

It’s not about what’s actually happening here on earth. It’s a religious principle.

This is entirely of a piece with the Conservative wooing of “ethnics.” Think they mean more than a mine of votes? Guess again. Ethnic groups are “markets.” At best, the government is playing off established immigrants against those who want to immigrate: divide and rule. At worst, it’s a cynical manipulation of people for whom the government actually cares less than nothing, so long as they “assimilate”: that is, stop standing out. (Note that the word “integrate” has a different meaning altogether, one with which progressives would likely agree.)

Meanwhile, government cuts that go virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media are ensuring that young Aboriginal Canadians stay dependent, without hope, even suicidal. (At some point we should amass a list of various hostile acts against the aboriginal population—the inferior social services available to Native children, for example, the strong reluctance of the government to provide proper schooling, the gutting of the Sisters in Spirit initiative—and set it against Harper’s bogus “apology” to the First Nations sometime back.)

We can all agree, perhaps, that the Harper government is expressing unprecedented concern to preserve and conserve the health of the body politic, as they see it. But it’s not based on anything other than what appears to be a frankly mystical ideology. Perhaps in the final analysis it’s all about precious bodily fluids and “foreign substances”:



[H/t Marie Ève for a goodly quantity of material b/c, and DAMMIT JANET, too]

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This page contains a single entry by Dr. Dawg published on July 23, 2011 5:47 PM.

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