FIRE! What fire? 2020-10

FIRE! What fire?

Jim Lipkovits, Publisher

2020-10-30

Notwithstanding the smoke from our southern neighbour’s (Canadian spelling) wildfires in California and Colorado, there is no apparent presidential and political connection to global warming, However we in this country cannot escape the political and social dumpster fire consuming the entire U.S. of A. It is a reminder of a history just before the oldest of us were born. Modern or post- modern Canadians should be aware that we may be in a situation similar to Czechoslovakia during the mid 1930’s during the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party in Germany.

Czechs watched with growing apprehension and terror the resurgence of neighbouring German supernationalism and the fascist Nazi Party. By 1937 the Third Reich and its renewed and rebuilt Wehrmacht war machine invaded neighbouring Czechoslovakia to free the small percentage of Czechs who claimed german ancestry to save them from persecution at the hands of their Slavic “overlords”. The rest as we all have read – is history. It’s the kind of scenario possible to see here in Canada.

The United States has an enormous stake in Doug Kenney’s Alberta, an American province-state with massive economic and strategic value to its homeland - boundaries notwithstanding. Already a hotbed of “Proud Boys” and “ 3 percenters” in the oil patch, there is no denying that some Albertans under Kenney can’t get more cozy to the new homeland.

Which is why the possibility of a supremacist Trumpian fascist takeover of the U.S. government and what was ostensibly a somewhat worn but useable model of democracy is so important to us. We could be the Czechs of the early 21^st century.

The United States is convulsing in an election period during a worldwide Pandemic in which the country is suffering mightily and which may ultimately be seen in Titanic proportions for not only themselves but for Canada and the world. American democrats will have to vanquish the supremacist Trump and his vulgar Republican sycophants in a effort to save some of the remains of what came to be known as western democracy. At stake is climate change, human and civil rights – reason vs ignorance, and democracy throughout the world.

Words alone cannot completely convey the events down south – perhaps our editorial cartoon artists and their cartoons can. Here are just a few of them.

The cartoons: