Editor:
I wonder if other Outlook readers concerned about the path the local Bow Valley Credit Union has chosen to build its membership, and perhaps equally concerned about the tone and content of recent statements made on behalf of Take Back Alberta about how they intend to “take back” our health and education systems, might find that the next two paragraphs somehow ring a bell.
"Propaganda is our artillery. Our goal must be to identify kinds of disturbances such as immigrant controversies, social and economic inequality, petty jealousies in public life and differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups. Even the frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians should be cultivated."
"The object is to find the fissures in society and pry them further apart, to make ordinary citizens hate and suspect each other until they wish for a new country all together. And at that moment we can take power and create that country in our own image."
If this in any way sounds familiar, and you fear that these statements mirror in any way the strategies the extreme political right is employing in Alberta right now, then you may be interested in who first said these words. They are attributed originally to Adolf Hitler. Our democracy, fellow citizens, is not collapsing as Tucker Carlson and local propagandists like him would have us believe. It is being actively sabotaged.
It's time, Canada, that we all woke up. Look south. The threat of extremism is real and it is being exported and cultivated here. We live in a moment of grave societal danger. We cannot separate the breakdown of our democracy from the threat posed to our society by the breakdown of the global climate system. The collapse of one will fuel and accelerate the breakdown of the other. If we don’t act now, one will then become the other. What then?
Never in our history have we so needed a passionate, committed and relentlessly informed citizenry than we do now. We may only have a few more years and a few more elections before the damage we are doing in tandem to both the climate and our democracy may be irreversible. We need to stop sleepwalking now.
Bob Sandford,
Canmore
