There Will Be Blood.

In 1928, My mum was born in Germany during the era known as Weimar. Germany in the year of my mother’s birth was a functioning democracy with a strong trade union movement and a free press. Although my mother was from the working class and raised by a single mother, her first years of life were content and filled with an abundance of food and familial love. However, within a few short years, Germany as a civilised society was in free fall. The reasons were many. But much of the blame for the rise of Hitler can be laid at the feet of right-wing politicians, the entitled class, a disaffected officer class and industrialists who cynically created intense political instability and societal division from the poverty the Great Depression engendered in the ordinary german worker.

When my mum turned four, Nazism was a political force on the verge of dominating the country. My mother was an eyewitness to Germany’s descent into totalitarianism.

In the summer of 1932, my mum watched, from her bedroom window, as Hitler’s SA fought a gun battle with communist party members across the rooftops of Hamburg’s working-class Altona district. When the adults in the apartment realised my mother was observing the bloody conflict going on outside her window, like it was a movie, they whisked her away to safety. Her mother told her not to fret because “Germany was a country of law and order.” But soon both the adults in her life and my mother understood that democracy is as fragile as Dresden porcelain when put into the hands of a mob.

These times we live in now have a familiarity with the political chaos of the 1930s when the politics of fascism destabilised Europe. Republicans in America, Boris Johnson in Britain, Scott Morrison in Australia and Canada’s conservative provincial premiers and federal politicians all have a distinctive affinity to use intolerance, ignorance of facts, nativism and xenophobia to govern their citizens in the 2020s.

In times of peace, conservative politics that sustains its energy through creating anger over excessive taxation, the cost of public health care, benefits to the vulnerable and compassion for refugees is dangerous. But during a global pandemic, it’s deadly. It wasn't bad luck that almost a million people are dead from Covid in the USA or over 160k in the UK. It was conservative politics that put the profits of big business over ordinary life.

Conservative politics have impeded a healthy exit from covid and a return to a more normal world, even in Canada. Right-wing populism promoted by its conservative premiers and championed by the federal conservative party has undermined Canada's democracy.

Capital cities in well-functioning democracies are not supposed to be under siege by a mob that wants a Prime Minister removed and a junta of the ignorant established. Yet this is happening in Canada. Brigands radicalised by right-wing talk radio, online libertarian forums, and shrill podcasts that spout fake information like Mount Vesuvius spouts lava has a section of Ottawa under its occupation.

For literate 21st-century people to want a revolution because society inoculated its population against a deadly virus to prevent mass death is democracy's dead canary in the coal mine.

The Truckers for Freedom movement in Canada is a rebellion of the few against the many. Canada has one of the highest rates for vaccination against covid in the G7. Most accept and endure the restrictions imposed upon them with little to no complaint.

Ordinary people grinned and bared their inconveniences caused by covid until politicians like Jason Kenney, Scott Moe Doug Ford, told them that it was too much to endure. For two years now, each of these premiers gnashed their teeth at how public health measures to save lives has negatively affected the economy without ever producing a provable statistic that the economy was tanking.

These premiers were reluctant to bring in sick days for workers or save the lives of vulnerable people in privately run LTC Homes. They didn't create better home-schooling methods or find revolutionary ways to treat mental health concerns created by the covid pandemic in the young. They didn't give any real assistance to front line workers whose lives were put on the line by working in areas where covid was rife. These conservative politicians created an atmosphere that allowed the population to become fatigued by Covid. It was not restrictions or vaccine mandates that made people angry, tired or cry like a child during a long journey, "I want to go home." It was Ford, Kenney and Moe who pandered to people's disappointments about having to postpone throwing a large party with friends or an all-inclusive vacation down South.

It is not a coincidence that Doug Ford dispensed with most covid restrictions, including the vax passport starting March 1st, while a small minority of politically right-leaning anti-vaxxers foment insurrection in Canada. What Doug Ford did is cynical populism at its worst. He wants to appeal both to the radical anti-vaxers and the citizens who mistake their fatigue over these last two years as caused by covid restrictions rather than how capitalism restricted their ability to live during a plague.

I do not know how it will end in Ottawa with the Truckers for Freedom Movement. What I do know is that there will be blood. The real question is whether it be ours from a premature abandonment of covid mandates that still save lives or theirs because instead of leaving peacefully, the occupiers will martyr themselves to a cause that mistakes selfishness for freedom.