Fascists Ideals

Giroux unveils a U.S. agenda also seen in Harper government

Re: America’s ‘culture of cruelty;’ The violence in Arizona has much deeper, more pervasive roots than mental illness or lack of civility (Opinion, Jan. 20)

What a privilege it is to live in a community with a social thinker of Henry Giroux’s calibre.

In a few paragraphs, he incisively unveils the right-wing agenda in the United States of separating individuals from their social contexts and of degrading, if not dismantling, public institutions. For the right, government’s purpose is to protect private money by maintaining law and order at home and military bases abroad. Those who “can’t make it” or “don’t cut it” are “losers” and shouldn’t be assisted in any way to improve their education, employment or health.

While we don’t have a gun culture in Canada, we do have a culture susceptible to a similar mythology: that private greed need not concern itself with public concerns and consequences.

The right-wing Stephen Harper government stands for many of the same things as its Republican cousins: more and bigger prisons, more military, more corporate tax cuts and less gun regulation.

It too attacks and belittles its opponents. It has the same mean-spiritedness and the same winner-take-all mentality.

J.S. Porter, Hamilton