It has always been an axiom that good writing starts with good research. It was when we ran across some research we had done on Italy of the late 1920s that a chilling thought came to mind. By no stretch of the imagination would we want to suggest that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a fascist but we found some aspects of fascism with which he might agree.
Mind you, saying that Stephen Harper is not a fascist is not entirely good news. It just makes him harder to understand. As a neo-con, he is a little of this and a little of that. He flies somewhere out there on the extreme right of the political spectrum. From that position, as an economist, he could embarrass the late Milton Friedman.
A reputable academic, Friedman would never buy into a sham such as the Fraser Institute that is so basic to Harper’s western support system. Friedman would have had difficulty tolerating the dishonesty of the institute’s positions. It hires academics to support its preconceptions, not to do any of the necessary research. Harper and the Fraser Institute share some difficulties with letting people know the truth.
Harper would be intrigued with the corporations that were the unique aspect of Italian fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. These corporations were part of the Italian government. It was like giving the tar sands exploitation companies the government portfolio for the environment. And while under Mussolini, Italian trains did run on time, the Italians were not all that happy with the cost.
One of the interesting aspects of giving corporations control of the Italian economy through the 1920s and 1930s was that they proved themselves more corrupt, venal, inefficient and incompetent in that role than any civil servants could have been. It is like the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission giving control of CTV to Bell Canada. That is some propaganda arm to give Harper’s friends at Bell.
That is one of the many differences between Stephen Harper and the late Pierre Trudeau. When Prime Minister, Trudeau used to despise the shallowness of the news media and he would tell them what he thought of them. Harper has decided they might be useful to him and looks for ways to ingratiate himself.
Harper is no Mussolini but he seems to agree with the Italian leader that parliaments are a noisy inconvenience. Mussolini was much more thorough about proroguing them than Harper has been.
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