MAGA Alberta and the Ghost of Jim Keegstra

There are no red lines in the attack on Canada

The stars are lining up in the Maple MAGA universe with one clear goal: take down Mark Carney by breaking up Canada.

Fresh off her trip to Mar-a-Lago with the shill Kevin O'Leary, Danielle Smith is at the centre of the effort. While the Prime Minister works to show a common front against Trump’s threat to take over our country, Smith has been energetically working to sell Canadians out.

As usual, she’s being cheered on by the pundits in the American-owned Postmedia, particularly their stable of Alberta "opinion" writers. They're doing their part to generate resentment against Canada, even if it means giving a thumbs-up to those who exploit the horrors of the Holocaust.

This week, Rick Bell of the Calgary Herald wrote a glowing article on Alberta separatist Mitch Sylvestre, who according to Bell, "is leading the charge" to break up the nation.

Bell portrayed Sylvestre as the tough, plain-speaking kind of guy that Albertans can rally around:

"If she [Smith] doesn't come around to us, there's going to be a big problem," Sylvestre is quoted as declaring.

What Bell doesn't mention is that Sylvestre's slideshow of grievances includes attacks on immigration, COVID science and gun laws. Apparently, these are all proof of some nefarious Liberal plot.

But what was disturbing in the Calgary Herald article was a photograph of Sylvestre using images from the Holocaust to attack Canada.

The head of the Alberta Prosperity Project seems to believe that Canada's relationship with Alberta is on par with the mass murder of six million Jews.

Rick Bell didn't think that was an issue worth commenting on.

Neither did the Calgary Herald, and neither did Premier Danielle Smith, who has Sylvestre as one of her riding association presidents.

---

Holocaust Denial, Canadian Style

Canada's far-right has a long and ugly history of Holocaust denial. But they have come some way since the days of Ernst Zundel, Paul Fromm and Jim Keegstra. Instead of holocaust denial, the right has shifted to something more insidious, holocaust diminishment.

We saw this during COVID when anti-vaxxers put the yellow Stars of David on their clothes to equate their refusal to wear masks as being on par with the death camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka.

At the same time, far-right extremists were promoting old antisemitic tropes about a global cabal run by the Rothschilds and George Soros for creating the pandemic.

Gideon Weiss, who is an associate professor in Middle Eastern Studies, writes that these appropriations of Holocaust imagery "point to a larger and more insidious problem: the loss and twisting of collective historical memory of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism."

The generation who witnessed the Holocaust are gone. The memory and meaning is being distorted by the politics of today.

A young generation is watching a real-time genocide being perpetrated in Gaza. They rightly note the cynicism of world leaders who tiptoe around the deliberate starvation of two million people.

The slogan "Never Again" rings hollow to students being arrested for calling for an end to the genocide.

And those who should hold up the Holocaust as a reminder of what happens when we normalize the mass death of civilians have been successfully weaponized to defend or excuse the perpetrators. The importance of remembering the Holocaust is to ensure that we never forget the magnitude of those crimes.

The risk is clear: if we forget, the unthinkable becomes thinkable again.

Which is why holocaust diminishment is a serious threat.

Consider Trump's decision last week to appoint Siggy Flicker, a reality TV star whose son was involved in the January 6th uprising, to the board of the Holocaust Museum.

The appointment came amid board infighting that Donald Trump is trying to politicize an institution whose mission is the education of the horrors of the atrocities committed at the death camps.

---

The Keegstra File

Which brings us back to the Maple MAGA campaign to break up the country using Holocaust rhetoric.

Do you remember Jim Keegstra? He was the mayor of Eckville, Alberta, and his public statements diminishing the Holocaust led to national backlash and a criminal case that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Keegstra wasn't your run-of-the-mill, antisemitic crackpot; he was deeply involved in Alberta politics. He was elected mayor, ran for both provincial and federal parliament and was active in the Social Credit party, the precursor to the modern UCP.

When Keegstra went on trial for hate promotion, Martin Hattersley, leader of the So-Creds, revoked his membership. But the Alberta party members voted Keegstra back in. This led to an extraordinary response from Hattersley, who resigned from the party, saying he couldn't stay in a political movement that accepted Holocaust denialism.

That's what leadership in Alberta's right wing used to be like.

Not anymore.

The Maple MAGA attack on our country is just getting started. It will get very ugly, and its supporters, with their media puppets, are playing for keeps.

When it comes to destroying our nation, all manner of dark players can be cheered on and romanticized.

---