Creating Fear, Cynicism, Bigotry, in order to rule

Nobody does it like right-wingers and few do it with as much fervid desperation as the harpercons. This isn't an original observation, I know, but for a few days I've been reflecting on the harpercons' cynical attempts to manufacture anxiety about the crime rate by making people think it's soaring when statistics show it's stagnant or falling.

It's one thing to cynically manipulate genuine fear in order to get people to empower you. But to actually set out to create that fear in the first place is bottom -of-the-barrel stuff indeed.

At some point in peoples' lives, those who have taken some wrong paths (alcoholism, selling dangerous narcotics, bumping people off of health insurance, writing bullshit studies that sow doubt about global warming or the harms of tobacco smoke, etc.) stop and ask themselves: "What have I become?" Some people are able to do the hard work, make the hard decisions, to turn their lives around. One would hope that those among the harpercons do the same.

What sort of moral midgets try to make people feel bad by inventing a problem where there isn't one? Think about it. The harpercons are trying to make Canadians feel less safe and secure. Why? So that the harpercons "solutions" (to the non-existent problem) will become attractive to these now-frightened voters. And it goes beyond that! While proposing their idiotic policies (which haven't worked when they were tried elsewhere in any case) they tell fearful Canadian voters that the opposition parties have been frustrating their efforts, so as to deliberately endanger Canadians in their efforts to "hug thugs" or whatever. The reality is that the opposition has been very accommodating at getting through necessary revisions to old crime legislation and has worked hard to work with the government with special committees to study legislation and propose sensible amendments. They have been forced to work harder because the government has had a bad habit of proroguing Parliament whenever it feels itself in danger politically, thus killing their "anti-crime" legislation on the order table again and again.

And it gets worse than that! Given the fact that there is no problem of rising crime in Canada, the harpercon solution to this non-existent problem, necessitates throwing tens of thousands of Canadians into prison for lengthy terms and weakening the constitutional rights of everyone else. I mean, how sickening is that? "There is no rising crime rate, but I'm going to pretend that there is so that I can obtain power, which I will use to take away peoples' rights and jail many of them, for no other real reason."

Scratch that last bit. There are a couple of other ulterior motives. Weakening Canadians' constitutional rights makes it easier to control them. And who wants to control them? Capitalist elites and authoritarian goons. (More on this in a moment.) As well, creating hysteria about crime and enacting harpercon policies will mean big budgets for police AND private security contractors, the building of larger prisons (for construction contractors, and, if you can successfully "privatize" the running of prisons (who will be paid from the public purse), you have another satisfied corporate customer providing support and cushy post-political jobs for you and your operatives. Sickening and sleazy.

If anything, the proven fact that right-wing social policies CREATE crime, combined with the fact that their "anti-crime" policies DO NOT WORK, (as the incarceration rates and crime rates in the USA so tragically prove), it is the right-wingers in general and the harpercons in particular who should be labelled "soft on crime." But, again, when you're the sorts of creatures who want to make people afraid when there's nothing to be afraid about, it goes without saying that you want to be able to control the populace so as to be able to exploit them while restricting their ability to fight back. When you've simultaneously manufactured hysteria about the threat of terrorism, you can incrementally describe genuine protests as terrorism and create an ideological justification for demonizing protesters and abusing them. But even without the public hysteria against protesters, your work at weakening constitutional rights by exploiting anxieties about crime has already made the work of crushing dissent easier.

Finally (and perhaps more depressingly?) the examples of the McGuinty Liberals and the Obama Democrats show that attacking constitutional rights and abusing human rights is not limited to moronic, retrograde right-wingers. (I feel obliged to say that authoritarianism is a character defect shared on the right and the left of the political spectrum, but I want to point out that I don't want anyone to believe that I think McGuinty or Obama are on the left.) The difference between "conservatives" and Liberals is that "conservatives" shriek and howl like monkeys in the ways I've just described, whereas Liberals are much more quiet about things and can seriously debate whether it makes sense to shovel public money out the door to enrich prison-building firms and incompetent, corrupt, private prisons. It is the right-wing, and especially in Canada, the harpercons, who yammer the loudest, the most dishonestly, the most cynically, the most stupidly, about the problem of crime and who propose the most criminal, cynical, incompetent "solutions."

And again I ask: "How repulsively amoral do you have to be to make a career out of such disgusting behaviour?"