Harper's Taste For War

Written By: 4Canada
Date: 2006-09-25 11:10:21
<a href="/article/4102158-harpers-taste-for-war">Article Link</a>

Stephen Harper: The War Prime Minister

Stephen Harper's contempt for Canada and what it became in the decades following the Second World War is firmly on the record. Most of his comments -- his sneering dismissal of our egalitarianism and sense of community -- relate to social programs like medicare. He once declared Canada "...a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its...social services to mask its second-rate status."

It was not until recently that he revealed his disdain for Canada's three decades of peacekeeping. In a CBC interview conducted as Parliament resumed sitting this month, Harper showed that he relished the fact that Canadian soldiers were war-fighting, and dismissed Canada's peacekeeping history as virtual cowardice: "For a lot of the last 30 or 40 years, we were the ones hanging back." He even mused that the deaths of Canadian soldiers were a boost for the military -- cathartic after years of not being able to kill or die like real soldiers. "I can tell you it's certainly engaged our military. It's, I think, made them a better military notwithstanding -- and maybe in some way because of -- the casualties."

Utterly blind to how the rest of the world sees the conflict in Afghanistan, Harper told the CBC that Canada's role in Afghanistan is "...certainly raising Canada's leadership role, once again, in the United Nations and in the world community."

You have only to look at Harper's history and his government's "five priorities" to understand why he would get Canada and himself deeper into a conflict he cannot win. For five years in the middle of his political career, Harper was with the National Citizens Coalition, an extreme right-wing organization that was founded by an insurance company millionaire explicitly to fight public medicare. Its slogan is "More freedom through less government." It is virtually impossible for Stephen Harper to recognize Canadian leadership in any field -- such as medicare -- that he believes Canada should not be involved in. For the Conservative prime minister, the Afghanistan conflict may be literally the first time that Canada has shown real leadership in decades.

Dying to be proud

<a href="http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/09/25/Afghanistan/">http://thetyee.ca/Views/2006/09/25/Afghanistan/</a>

[Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on September 27, 2006]

I believe in a strong military as well. I even tried enlisting years ago, but was refused on medical grounds.

However unlike chickenhawk Harper, I don't believe we should be sending our forces into stupid situations such as fighting foreign wars.

Especially when all the PM is entering those wars for is to get the approval of a corrupt terrorist/war criminal posing as a President.

If Harper is so gung-ho for war, then HIS chickenhawk ass should be front and center when it comes time to ship out.

But then, he's too much the coward to actually put his own precious ass in some Afghans gunsight, something the Canadian troops stationed there do every day.

---
"and the knowledge they fear is a weapon to be used against them"

"The Weapon" - Rush

Harper is a neoclassicaly brainwashed economist, plus a disciple of Strauss, who firmly believes that "competition" is the necessary way of life.

Unfortunately, he doesn't have the brains to realize that competition always increases costs, and that the purpose of economic competition is to transfer the increased costs on others. Or perhaps he does, but his Straussian brainwash excuses the crimes committed by "competitors"

War and crime are the ultimate degrees of so called "free enterprise" economic competition, so chickenbrained people support it.

History shows that "competitive" societies always self destruct, because they burn out and collapse. There's no other way. We can now watch the process repeating itself with the USA.

Unfortunately, millions of people will die before the message sinks in, as it has happened many times in history.

Ed Deak, Big Lake

What's the alternative to competition?

"Cooperation" I assume?

"Stephen Harper, ... with the support of fewer than 40 per cent of citizens"

Technically that's not a lie. In fact, you could say that Harper has fewer than 100 percent support and still be telling the truth.

I doubt very much that someone who got only about 23% of the eligible vote has anything remotely close to 40 percent support, especially when he's done nothing but make Canadians feel as if they are living in the Twilight Zone.

Funny how when we do other important things like build airplanes, make medical equipment, build skyscrapers we make sure we have the best and most recent materials and knowledge in order to do it right, but when it comes to business people rely on an outdated notion than came into being 150+ years ago and has caused nothing but grief ever since it's inception.

The dogma of "competition" reads okay on paper as a theory, but fails utterly when taken off the page and actually applied.

"Competition" as practiced by corporations ruins the lives of people by always, and by deliberate decision, going to where THEIR costs are lower without taking into regard the fates of the very people who made them into what they are in the first place.

Those "lowered costs" are seen by corporate bots as "savings" and "dividends", when all they are is plunder stolen from the communities and nations those former employees live in.

It is indeed a rare corporation that actually acknowledges it's responsibility to those working for it.

Most that I am aware of just take the money and run.

---
"and the knowledge they fear is a weapon to be used against them"

"The Weapon" - Rush

Okay, but how would that work?

As a practical economic matter, the alternative to competition is monopoly.

The problem with non-regulated or insufficiently regulated monopolies is that they gouge customers and offer poor service with impunity. If they have a price inelastic product, then there is almost no limit to what they can do. Unregulated monopolies have all the worst aspects of private enterprise with none of the benefits.

One the other extreme, the heavily regulated monopoly dispenses with the incentive structures that make private enterprise work. Pleasing the regulator become more important than the profit level (after all, why increase profits that the regulator will only take away if they don't like how you're making them?), leading to a situation where the regulated monopoly starts to act like a branch of government. The incentives, as with government, become empire-building and bloat rather than lean production and efficiency. The costs are passed down to the consumer. The customer becomes incidental, and as a consequence service goes down the toilet.

Either way, you get similar results - high prices, poor service, shoddy products.

Now what about state-owned monopolies. They're okay, unless you actually want the enterprise to accomplish something or provide a useful product or service. The primary activity of a state-owned monopoly is empire-building.

Why did the federal Liberals sink into corruption and arrogance, as demonstrated in the sponsorship scandal? A lack of competition. Why did Air Canada become so arrogant and complacent after the demise of Canadian Airlines? Once again, the lack of competition? How does Microsoft get to ship such buggy software? You get the picture.

Why are people so frightened of meritocracy?

That's because, as the individualist indicated, modern man thinks there is only competition or monopoly and both are grounded in greed. Cooperation, is not. There is more to life than money and there would be enough of everything to go around if one continent (NA) wasn't gobbling up more than its fair share of the resources and worse, setting the precedent for developing nations to follow.

---
Dear Abby, Dear Abby my fountain pen leaks, my wife hollers at me and the kids are all freaks

Harpers need for war sounds like he wants to get back at bullys that beat him up as a child. I'm sure there were many if his way of thinking hasn't changed. 
You certainly don't need war for a proud military but readiness for defence is a must. If we were to follow the swiss model we would likely be better off. Sending most of our troops overseas to ensure a large future enemy population seems at best counterproductive. I'm sure the entire muslim world is choc-full of Canada haters now although many of us despise Harpers outlook on war. 
Nobody calls the swiss cowardly for not sending troops to other nations but I guess they are soldiers for god""$"" 
with their banking system. 
 
<a href="http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/country_profile/detail/Defence.html?siteSect=2605&sid=5246977">http://www.swissinfo.org/eng/country_profile/detail/Defence.html?siteSect=2605&sid=5246977</a>

Economic ompetition should only be tolerated as a search for excellence, never for profits, because we can see the results in inflation, destitution and environmental destruction, justified by a fraudulent accounting system.

Go to google and type in "W. Edwardes Deming", the guy who pulled post war Japan up by its boostrings and made it a major power and who discovered a long time ago that monetary economic competition leads to self destruction.

Ed Deak.

Well said.

---
"I think it's important to always carry enough technology to restart civilization, should it be necessary." Mark Tilden

This could be a very lengthy discussion.

One thing I'll say about the form of "competition" that we see around us in our highly controled and regulated business world, is that it's not really fair competition, which means that it's not really competition at all but something else that more resembles a monopolistic way of doing business at a certain level.

The ideaology that promotes competition above all else as being the best way to do business and run a society is a tragic fallacy that retards a societies ability to prosper.

In the real-world there are in fact many examples of efforts which are based on cooperation and variants which are a mixture of cooperation and competition working very well and better than competition alone because ideas are more openly shared and the effort can be better pooled to a commen end.

In my view, we should have open minds and adopt whatever strategy works best for the given situation at hand. I do not favor competition above all else, nor do I favor cooperation above all else.

Deming was a genius well ahead of his time even to this day.

The concept of "thinking lean" is a much more healthy approach to doing busines and/or running a society. Instead of focusing on profits above all else, the focus is on doing more with less in a way that makes more efficient and effective use out of your available resources. In a "lean" organization, the concept of "competition" has much less meaning and may be discouraged all together.

An example of healthy lean thinking is to reduce the amount of polution being dumped into the environment which leads to innovations that allow (for example) a factory to operating more efficiently while using much less resources. A cleaner environment leads to healthier people (among other benefits) which leads to a more productive and prosperous workforce, in addition it leads to a better use of limited land and water (etc) for doing other things, such as growing food.

There's no need at all to focus on profits, and true prosperity will increase as a natural result.

Some countries, such as the USA end up with a lot of concentrated wealth, and do so at great self-destructive expense - the results as we see it south of the border speaks for itself. To adopt the same obviously failing ideolgy is more than foolish, it's the kiss of death.

"This could be a very lengthy discussion."

Yes, one from which Mr. Deak is conspicuous in his absence. He always ducks the question of what the alternative to competition is. He bleats on and on about how bad competition is, and further wears out that already threadbare quote by that statist Galbraith.

But when you challenge him on that fact that a non-competitive economy is by definition monopolistic, he throws out further rhetorical chaff about his success in business and his belief that competition is only good if nothing really important is at stake.

And I'm not even going to dignify the silly fluffy-cloud altruist utopians with a response to their nonsense about selfless "cooperation" as the basis for an economy, other than they should really grow up.