Let's Talk About the "Culture of Fear"

The far left simply doesn't get it -- they didn't get it before, and they won't get it now

Writing mere hours before the outbreak of violent protests in downtown Toronto surrounding the set-to-begin G20 summit, Rabble.ca's Darren Puscas published an article entitled "Harper's aggressive plants: Canada at the G8 and G20 Summits".

Among the plans Puscas treats as "aggressive" are the promotion of budgetary austerity amidst the European economy walking a tightrope between tenuous stability and total collapse, opposition to a global bank tax, opposition to Iran's nuclear program, climate realism, and the child & maternal health program.

And one other thing: Puscas insists that Stephen Harper is propagating a "culture of fear" around the G8 and G20 summits:

For the far-left, Puscas' article is a potent and somehow welcoming fantasy, built upon a heap of other ideological fictions.

Yet as Canadians confront the reality unfolding in downtown Toronto, Puscas will likely be disappointed to learn that his propaganda cannot obscure the truth: it isn't Stephen Harper that has propogated a culture of fear around these summits, it's the far left.

After all, it isn't Stephen Harper currently smashing windows and torching police cruisers in downtown Toronto. It's the extreme anarchist denizens of the black bloc -- not an organized group, per se, but rather a pseudo-spontaneous mass intended to provide cover by allowing violent, black-clad protesters to nearly vanish within it.

When one considers Puscas' denunciation of "the insider and outsider reality that marks the global economy", it becomes clear that the violent thugs at work today share Puscas' perspective on the matter.

The goal of the black bloc is to spread fear amongst leaders and their supporters, so as to breed acquiesence to their agenda.

In other words, it's the black bloc, sharing Puscas' agenda, that are seeking to create a culture of fear.

In fact, it quickly becomes apparent that the security perimeter built around around the summit site is entirely justified in order to contain and control these violent outbursts -- Puscas' description of it clearly is not.

Not that one should expect Darren Puscas to understand this. He clearly didn't understand it when he wrote his Rabble article, and he almost certainly doesn't understand it now.