The Politics of Obscurantism: Anti-Intellectualism

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

In restricting knowledge to an élite ruling class of “the few”, obscurantism is fundamentally anti-democratic, because its component anti-intellectualism and elitism exclude the people as intellectually unworthy of knowing the facts and truth about the government ... (1)

The late Dalton Camp, formerly president of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, was not an alarmist. He was intelligent and a well respected columnist and author.

So when he began warning Canadians of the dangers of the Reform Movement, almost two decades ago, we should have listened. He understood their ideology and was concerned with the Republicans they had aligned themselves with. The same people who are now destroying American politics, as card carrying members of the Religious Right and the Tea Party gang.

In the introduction to his book; Whose Country is This Anyway?, Camp quotes Friedrich Nietzsche from The Will to Power: "The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men."

This is a codicil for the comfortable, the affluent, and the obscenely rich in our time, as it was the inspiration for fascism earlier in our century. The new order is not without its coterie of apologists and intellectual dandies. Indeed, it even has a political party of its own, called—irony of ironies—the "Reform" Party. (2)

Germany under Hitler was fascist, because it was run by industrialists, who profited from war and the build up of the country's military. The German people, while manipulated with propaganda, were nothing more than "a misfortune to higher men."

The notion of anti-intellectualism can mean simply that Stephen Harper has always opposed public education, referring to it as "union run schools", and bragging that "Universality has been severely reduced: it is virtually dead as a concept in most areas of public policy... These achievements are due in part to the Reform Party..." (3)

It can also refer to his attacks on the well educated who challenge his policies, dismissing them as "university types" ... "elites".

But in the theory of Obscurantism, it's something much more profound. It's a deliberate attempt to paint themselves as being part of the anti-intellectual crowd, despite the fact that many in the movement have university degrees, including several PhDs. And they do this to convince the populace that they are just "ordinary folk", who see danger in listening to intellectuals who don't have their best interests at heart.

A deliberate obscuring of the facts.

Betty Plewes recently wrote a column for the Mark News, the topic of which was Canada's abandonment of the Non-Profit sector. She mentions a speech given by Lawrence Cannon in Krakow, to the Working Group on Enabling and Protecting Civil Society. She found the speech enlightening and articulate, but was surprised that "a transcript of the speech was not posted on the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) website and is very difficult to obtain." (4)

She contributed that to the fact that Stephen Harper has no interest in charitable pursuits, but while that is true, there is another reason for this. Cannon's speech would contradict their image of "folks" and their notion that intellectuals are the scourge of society.

The Edmonton Journal recently asked: What would Harper Fellowship look like a decade after his departure? They suggested:

Some criteria for evaluating the body of work put forward for recognition might include:
- -Best description and "proof" of a national social problem without the use of statistical analysis;
- -Best policy proposal for the betterment of Canadian society based solely on anecdotal "evidence";
-Best application of the concept of "truthiness" to future Canadian policy directions. (5)

What would a Harper fellowship look like, when his political strategy is anti-intellectualism? Having his party play dumb to appear dumb? Only their leader has any smarts and that's why he has to exert so much control over them.

When the Reform Party had their first real electoral success in 1993, the media dismissed them, often asking "who are these yokels and who voted for them?" The Sun referred to them as a " ribald bunch of dung kicking rednecks", and Preston Manning with his squeaky voice was compared to a country preacher.

And yet Manning is a brilliant physicist and many in the party's hierarchy (now called the Conservative Party of Canada) have university degrees. So why did they not defend themselves against this belief? In a word: Obscurantism. If they appear to be country bumpkins, how could we possibly fear them?

And if anyone points this out, they become "elites", and are immediately silenced, to the cheers of their supporters.

Stephen Harper is a Straussian, and Leo Strauss a follower of the belief in the necessity of obscuring facts. And Strauss's beliefs came from the methods used by the Nazi party to earn and hold onto power. He escaped Germany, but several of his family members died in Concentration camps. As a result he felt that an authoritarian style government was the only solution to stave off a recurrence of Nazism. The ignorant masses only had to be controlled, in a large part by keeping secrets and obscuring the truth.

When political philosopher, and colleague of Strauss, Hannah Arendt, attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann at Nuremberg, she was surprised at how "Unimaginative, ordinary and unthinking" he was.

Others may have hoped to see Bluebeard in the dock, she wrote, but for her, the horror lay in the fact that "there were so many like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic ... [but] terribly and terrifyingly normal." (6)

She was one of the first to refute the "monster theory" of less-than-human Nazis. She called them "banal". But as Erna Paris, author of Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, points out. Many Nazis were well educated, and several had doctorate degrees.

So what would have made her think that they were banal?

Maybe their chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels, himself a PhD, explains it best.

"It would have been very unwise if we had given exact explanations to the Jews, prior to the Seizure of Power, of what we intended to do with them.... It was quite good that [they] did not take the National-Socialist movement quite as seriously as it actually deserved. . . ." (7)

We did not take the Reform "movement quite as seriously as it actually deserved." And while they are not planning a domestic genocide, they do have an aggressive foreign policy agenda, from a prime minster that Lawrence Martin claims sees the world as a "clash of civilizations" rather than as "one big family". (8)

Dalton Camp did not suggest that the Reform Party was stupid, but called them "intellectual dandies". He did however, suggest that they were dangerous, in part because of the company they kept. American Straussians.

Sources:

1. Obscurantism - Wikipedia

2. Whose Country is This Anyway? By Dalton Camp, Douglas & McIntyre, 1995, ISBN: 1-55054-467-5, Pg. 18

3. Stephen Harper, speech to the Colin Brown Memorial Dinner, National Citizens Coalition, 1994

4. In Search of Canada's Non-Profit Policy, By Betty Plewes Former President and CEO of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation; member of the McLeod Group, The Mark News, October 18, 2010

5. What would Harper Fellowship look like a decade after his departure? By The Edmonton Journal, October 4, 2010

6. Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History, By Erna Paris, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, ISBN: 0-676-97251-9, Pg. 318

7. June 1944 speech at Nuremberg.

8. Harperland:The Politics of Control, By Lawrence Martin, Viking Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-670-06517-2

The Politics of Obscurantism: Then You Control the Press

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” - Joseph Goebbels

Stephen Harper's manipulation of the Press is legendary, and I've posted on it often.

But when viewed through the lens of Obscurantism, something a friend suggested I examine, everything becomes much clearer.

It ties Leo Strauss, neoconservatism and the Harper government together quite nicely.

Obscurantism is the art of obscuring the facts. It's deliberate and reaches to the emotions of the populace, rather than their intellect.

A normal political tool, but under Harper it has become an art form.

And to achieve this state, all messaging had to be controlled. But not to worry. They say it's for our own good.

A Crime to Practice Journalism

He held in his thin, knob-knuckled hands last week a new National Press Law making it a crime to practice journalism in Germany except as a licensed member of a nationwide closed shop. The law covers "all persons who take a share in forming the mental contents of any newspaper or political periodical through the written word or pictures." (1)

Harper's silencing of the press was not done with a National Press Law, but through a steady erosion of access. It started with the practice of not announcing cabinet meetings to avoid media scrums.

Harper never liked the tradition of holding media scrums after cabinet meetings. He started concealing the times of those meetings to keep his ministers away from the microphones. Cabinet and caucus members, with few exceptions, were instructed to avoid talking to the media without prior approval. At press conferences, Harper's office also wanted to control who asked questions. The press conferences were limited to specific issues as Harper did away with the wide-open meetings with the media, which had been a long-time custom ... (2)

Time magazine covered these "secret" cabinet meetings, and while legally the government had to announce them, Harper would wait until the meeting was well underway before meeting his legal obligations. And in describing one of those announcements:

...the veiled wording of the advisory--"There will be a Government media availability, today in the foyer of the House of Commons"--was almost Soviet in its stiff obfuscation ... Canadians should be worried when they see the government trying to exert such an unprecedented level of control." (3)

They also quoted Alasdair Roberts, a Syracuse University public-policy professor, who asked, "How can the average Canadian make a judgment about whether their government is being well run if they don't have access to the information?" (3)

Setting an Example

Walter Schwertfeger was a well-known Berlin journalist. When Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, announced the new rules to the German media, Schwertfeger went public, venting with the foreign press.

For this he was charged with treason against the State and given a life sentence.

The case.. has been something of a sensation both in German and foreign newspaper circles, as well as diplomatic quarters in Berlin, because Walter Schwertfeger was understood to have been arrested for supplying foreign correspondents and diplomats with some confidential instructions isued to the German press by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda ... Schwertfeger's sentence is the seventh passed thus far on Germans charged with the crime of supplying foreigners with any kind of information.

It is in line with the steady extension of the treason laws and practice of the People's Tribunal, designed to make the whole German nation a "community of oath-bound men" tightly shut off from prying 'foreign eyes, not only in respect to military affairs, but to all others as well. Particularly it may be assumed to represent a warning to all Germans not to give foreigners any kind of information, in order to shut off foreign observers here from their independent sources of information and restrict them to their official propaganda agencies. (4)

Stephen Harper began with warnings and then became more aggressive with the media if they dared to challenge him. When two journalists were held hostage on a plane (5), one of them David Aken, justified it by saying:

Harper's detractors may think we should just give the metaphorical finger to such directives from the PMO but, at one photo opp while we were here, a reporter who did just that and asked a question at a photo opp, despite warnings not to, was immediately warned that, if she continued, reporters would no longer be allowed to attend such photo opps. That would not be good for our access would be curtailed even further.

PMO staff also made veiled threats that that individual's organization might suffer further sanction -- all because of the impertinence of asking a question. If you are a media organization in Ottawa, these are no small consequences. (6)

And then there's those large RCMP bodyguards who make sure that reporters do as they're told. This video used to show Bob Fife being knocked to the ground, but was later edited, removing that part. More obstruction.



During the G-20, the media was targeted, beaten and arrested. Even Steve Paikin, one of the more conservative in the media was shocked. And he was not alone.

Reporters covering the G20 summit in Toronto say they were the target of police violence overnight, as riots blamed on anarchist groups left four police cars burning in the financial district and resulted in the arrests of some 150 people. "A newspaper photographer was shot with a plastic bullet in the backside, while another had an officer point a gun in his face despite identifying himself as a member of the media," reported the Canadian Press news agency. The agency did not say if it was its own reporters who were targeted.

The Huffington Post showed Brandon Jourdan being thrown to the ground and beaten by police while shooting video, and female journalists were threatened with rape.

And despite all this, the message was that Harper and his riot squad did a good job. The burning police cars were evidence that the one billion for security was money well spent. This even after the police admitted that they were told to stand down, and let the vandals do their job. Other video shows the police walking away from the carnage.

Who made the decision for police to stand down despite the fact the city was under attack? And why? Was it a police decision or political? These should be the cornerstone questions of an external review surrounding the chaos of the G20. After all, police officers were trained to stop the Black Bloc anarchists, were appropriately equipped and massively manned.

As downtown Toronto witnessed burning police cars and a small group of thugs on a rampage, a police source tells me the only thing that stopped the officers from doing that was an order telling them not to. They tell me they could have rounded up all, or most of them, in no time. I have had several frontline police officers tell me they were told not to get involved. But even before that decision was made, says one insider, there was mass confusion and indecision. (7)

All part of Obscurantism. Twisting the message by manipulating and then distorting the facts, while putting the media in it's place.

And Stephen Harper has not made one single statement to explain himself.

But then, he doesn't have to. We are the commoners who are "unworthy of knowing the facts".

Previous:

The Politics of Obscurantism: First You Obstruct

The Politics of Obscurantism: Next You Control the Message

Sources:

1. Foreign News: Consecrated Press, Time Magazine, October 16, 1933

2. Harperland: The Politics of Control, By Lawrence Martin, Viking Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-670-06517-2, Pg. 63-65

3. Controlling The Message, By Steven Frank, Time Magazine, April 03, 2006

4. REICH JOURNALIST GETS A LIFE TERM: Walter Schwertfeger Accused of Revealing Confidential Press Orders to Foreigners. Sentence Seen as Move to Bar Correspondents' Independent Sources of Information,
The New York Times, July 22, 1936.

5. Media have no flight plan on PM's plane, By James Fitz-Morris, January 29, 2010

6. Harper and the press gallery hit the road: 3 nights, 3 1/2 questions, By David Akin , January 29, 2010

7. Cops had hands 'cuffed, By Joe Warmington, Toronto Sun, June 30, 2010

The Politics of Obscurantism: Next You Control the Message

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

"His full conquest of the masses came only after [he] had silenced oppositional opinion and had acquired total control of the media." Konrad Heiden (1)

The next component of Obscurantism, a concept that a friend suggested I explore, is message control. I've covered most of these things before but was amazed at how well they fit with this definition. So if you feel uncomfortable calling Stephen Harper a Fascist, call him an Obscurantist. Both fit.

In the pragmatic exposé of Stephen Harper, in his new book Harperland, Lawrence Martin devotes a chapter to Harper's "control fixation". But control is a key element of neoconservatism, as espoused by Leo Strauss.

According to Martin:

The PMO was in the course of putting in place a message-control system, a vetting operation unlike anything ever seen in the capital. No other government had even come close to such a system of oversight.

The new regimen called for all public pronouncements by civil servants, diplomats, the military, cabinet members, and Conservative MPs to be approved by the Prime Minister's Office or its bureaucratic arm, the Privy Council Office (PCO). The vetting was by no means a quick rubber-stamping procedure. If a government official or a caucus member wanted to say something publicly, he or she would first have to fill out a Message Event Proposal (MEP) and submit it to central command. This form had sections with such titles as Desired Headline, Strategic Objective, Desired Sound Bite, and the like. It also had areas for supplying details on the speaking backdrop, the ideal event photograph, and even the speaker's wardrobe.

Once submitted, the MEP was studied by PMO and PCO officials, often bouncing back and forth between apparatchiks before getting final approval. Some MEPs required less vetting than others, but the massive centralization caused logjams, delays, and in some cases, cancellation of planned events because the requester never heard back in time. Keith Beardsley recalled even events for cabinet ministers being derailed. "Every communications director for every minister was trying to get stuff through. Their ministers wanted to do things," he said. But "because of the backlog [sometimes an event] got delayed and delayed and it was cancelled." In the past, while there was sonic vetting, departments produced their own news releases and scheduled events for ministers independently. Under Harper, such freedom was not allowed. (2)　

Time Magazine 1936:

Because Adolf Hitler's speeches may be used to prove almost anything, the Nazi Commission of Inspection of Nazi Literature announced that Hitler's speeches may not be quoted in print hereafter without the Commission's express permission. Hearing that the rebellious pastors of the German Evangelical [Lutheran] Church plan to print and circulate privately their unanswered protest to the Reichsführer against practically everything going on in Nazi Germany, the Gestapo (secret police) raided Confessional Synod offices, lugged off typewriters, mimeograph and printing machines. (3)

"Such freedom was not allowed".

The German version of the "Message Event proposal" was handled by Philipp Bouhler, who was "the Chairman of the Official Party Inspection Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature, which determined what writings were suitable for Nazi society, and which were not." (4)

Before you can even hope to set up a system of obscuring the message, you have to be able to control the message. And Stephen Harper incrementally created a system whereby he controls every word that comes out of the mouths of not only his caucus, especially his ministers, but the public service as well.

And the media has become so conditioned to this, that they rarely question it. Matthew Brett wrote recently for Global Research:

Not surprisingly, the Globe and Mail and other news organizations ran a press release from the PMO's office verbatim, with no critical commentary, analysis or insight. The state of media today is such that copy-pasting a press release from the PMO and slapping it on the front page of a national daily newspaper is accepted practice. Indeed, Conservative strategist Tom Flanagan writes that “compared to most countries with which I have any familiarity, the Conservatives in Canada actually have friendly media to work with.” The ‘Propaganda Model’ is more than alive and well, but sometimes without even bothering to ‘filter’ news content. (5)

The Conservatives in Canada have friendly media to work with, or just lazy media. Either way they should be ashamed. And this certainly contradicts their stance that the media is out to get them.

But besides just writing their own copy, the Conservatives now also take their own photos. After an image was published and incorrectly labelled as an actual event, Steven Chase wrote:

Since the spring [of 2009], the PMO has effectively set up its own picture service, e-mailing photos to Canadian media almost daily in an effort to find a market for publicity shots of Mr. Harper's activities. It's a service that ultimately competes with the work of photojournalists, but one, they argue, that should not be relied upon as a record of events. (6)

And they didn't stop at providing photos, but now also provide videos.

Taxpayers are being asked to pay an extra $1.7-million this fiscal year to help bolster Stephen Harper's communications support services – just as the Prime Minister's Office begins distributing government videos of Harper to the news media. Supplementary estimates tabled last month by the Privy Council Office, the Prime Minister's bureaucratic back office, boosted internal operational spending by almost $7.3-million for 2009-10. That's on top of existing budgets. (7)

By doing things in small steps, the public remains mostly unaware that everything they see and hear from our government, as reported by the press, is staged for our amusement. But when you look at the big picture, that's when it becomes frightening.

Sometimes the media, and pundits, must feel the hairs on the back of their necks stand up, so they will dismiss it by suggesting that other prime ministers have done this. But as Lawrence Martin says, it's: "... a vetting operation unlike anything ever seen in the capital. No other government had even come close to such a system of oversight."

"No other government had even come close." Worth repeating.

By dismissing this, journalists and columnists are only creating an enabling condition that further threatens our democracy, which is already hanging on by a thread.

Previous:

The Politics of Obscurantism: First You Obstruct

Sources:

1. Der Fhehrer, Hitler's Rise to Power, By: Konrad Heiden, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944

2. Harperland:The Politics of Control, By Lawrence Martin, Viking Press, 2010, ISBN: 978-0-670-06517-2, Pg. 58

3. GERMANY: Tyranny, Time Magazine, August 03, 1936

4. Philipp Bouhler - Wikipedia

5. Canadian Politics: The Newly Benevolent Stephen Harper, By Matthew Brett, Global Research, March 14, 2010

6. Is Stephen Harper going too far in trying to control his image? By Steven Chase, Globe and Mail, November 06, 2009

7. Taxpayers on hook for $1.7-million as PMO rolls out video, By Bruce Cheadle, The Canadian Press, December 08, 2009

The Politics of Obscurantism: First You Obstruct

A CULTURE OF DEFIANCE: History of the Reform-Conservative Party of Canada

A friend sent me a link to a page on the political concept of Obscurantism, which is characterized by deliberate vagueness in an attempt to obscure the facts. He felt that this best described the Harper government's methods and he's absolutely right.

But it also describes the techniques used by Republican strategists. The same Republican strategists who taught Stephen Harper everything he knows.

And as many people are aware, much of this comes from the mastermind, Leo Strauss, who is said to be the father of the Neoconservative movement. Now and then those in the media will hint at Harper being a Straussian, but when Rick Salutin came right out and said it in a column for the Globe and Mail, he was fired.

Which actually adds further proof that this government is engaged in the art of obstruction and obscurantism. All governments do that to a certain extent, but none before in Canada, had it down to a science.

And in understanding Leo Strauss and his political ideas, while they may originate with Plato's 'Noble Lie', they are actually found in the rise and prolonged success of the Nazi Party. A blueprint for fascism. The definitive Obscurantism.

But I'm not talking about the war or the Holocaust, but simply how the Nazi Party was able to achieve such ultimate control of a nation. And they did it with a minority government.

If you read newspaper or magazine accounts of Adolf Hitler throughout the 1920's and early '30's, they are mostly unflattering and dismissive. They mock Hitler and his thugs. They were not called Nazi's but 'Hitler's Fascist Brown Shirts'.

In fact the term Nazi was not an abbreviation of their name: National Socialist German Workers Party, but a term coined by journalist Konrad Heiden, who followed Hitler for 23 years. He gave them the name when he would march with them in a loose infiltration to get his story. 'Nazi' he said was a Bavarian slang term meaning "country bumpkin" (1).

Time magazine began writing of them as early as 1923, yet they did not use 'Nazi' until 1935. They were simply the 'Fascist Brown Shirts'. And when they first entered the Reichstag, they did everything in their power to 'obstruct' as a means to 'obscure'.

In one parallel, Elizabeth May in her book Losing Confidence, describes some of the obstructive actions of the Harper caucus.

In one memorable Question Period, the question was about the safety of pet food in response to the tragic incident of poisoned pet food from China. The Conservative backbenchers started barking, "Woof, woof. Bow-wow" ... Heckling has also taken a crueler tone. Sexist taunts are more common*. Government MPs have even taken to loud booing of certain Liberal MPs they most dislike, even before a question can be asked. This is particularly the case for women MPs. For a while, whenever Judy Sgro rose to speak, the Conservatives would chant "pizza" in reference to the allegations from a campaign worker that she had violated elections laws by accepting free pizza for her volunteers. Although she was cleared by Elections Canada, chanting "pizza" seems to entertain the Conservatives. (2)

Now from Time Magazine and the behaviour of the Brown Shirts at the Reichstag (Parliament) in 1930.

At women's names the Brown Shirts crowed. "Kikeriki! Kikeriki! Kikeriki!" —German equivalent to Cockadoodle-doo! (Fascists both German and Italian, hold that women are respectworthy as hens, jeerworthy when by entering politics they try to be roosters.) On the first day of the Reichstag session absolutely nothing was done except to call and jeer the roll. (3)

A calculated attempt to obstruct.

And the Harper government continued this obstruction, even creating a manual on how to make sure that Parliamentary committees can't function properly. (4)

I think we need to grow up and start realizing that Neoconservatism is Fascism in it's political strategies. Leo Strauss was a product of this era. He feared Communism and hated Liberalism. As a young boy he became aware of the cruel aspects of Communist Russia when his parents offered safe haven to a group of Russian Jews, escaping a pogrom. They told horrible tales, which as a young Jewish boy, left him wondering if that could happen to him (5). His first brush with anti-Semitism.

As an adolescent he joined the Zionist youth movement, and became a member of the Blau-Weiss. Strauss would refer to it as "pagan-fascism", (6) and their leader, Walter Moses, liked to imitate Mussolini. It was here that Strauss claimed to have nurtured his authoritarianism, and the concept of a clique**, led by a dictatorial style leader.

He had an intellectual relationship with Nazi Carl Schmitt, and in fact it was Schmitt who got Strauss out of Germany before the worst took place. Strauss colleague Hannah Arendt once said that he tried to join the Nazi Party but was turned away because he was Jewish.

If we continue to squirm every time the Harper government is referred to as Fascists, we will never understand what is happening to our country. They are not Conservatives. They are not Tories. They are Straussian Fascists, and one of the documented strategies to gain and hold onto power, is to obscure and obstruct. Because Strauss believed that the people (us) are "intellectually unworthy of knowing the facts and truth about the government."

Footnotes:

*They even heckled Carolyn Bennett when she was discussing H1N1.

** Writer Paul Berman called neoconservatism ‘a clique with a style that is marked by ruthlessness.’ He saw in neoconservatism a dangerous ‘romance of the ruthless,’

Sources:

1. Master of the Masses, Time Magazine, February 07, 1944

2. Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and Crisis in Canadians Democracy, By Elizabeth May, McClelland & Stewart, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-7710-5760-1, Pg. 71-72

3. GERMANY: Br, Time Magazine, October 27, 1930

4. Tories blasted for handbook on paralyzing Parliament, Canadian Press, May. 18, 2007

5. Why We Remain Jews," Lecture delivered by Strauss at the Hillel House, University of Chicago, 1962

6. Leo Strauss's 1923 celebration of "pagan-fascism" , By Alan Gilbert, Democratic Individuality, January 8, 2010