A Despicable Comparison – Winnipeg Free Press

Opinion

‘They ruined it for me this year, political leaders standing on their rostrum pretending they care, pretending…that they understand the sacrifice, not understanding that their actions are exactly the actions our brave men and women in uniform were fighting against.” — Alberta Premier Danielle Smith podcasting during the pandemic — late 2021

“Referring to people who succumb to the ‘tyrant’s charms,’ including Hitler, he said, ‘we’ve seen it. We have 75 percent of the public saying not just ‘hit me but hit me harder, keep us away from those dirty unvaccinated’.” — Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid

There wasn’t much coverage in the news this week of the 78th Anniversary of VE Day. There was a lot of coverage 28 years ago, because it was the 50th anniversary. Fifty is a much more attractive number than 78.

Maybe there will be more coverage in 22 years; there is also something significant in the number 100.

For the Adler family and many millions more, each anniversary of that day is important. Seventy-eight years ago, the Nazi forces surrendered to the Allies in Europe, they surrendered to the Americans, the British, and the Canadians, among others.

Seventy-eight years ago, this week marked the first time in a long time that my father, sitting in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia, and my mother, an 11-year-old girl battered by the war in the Jewish ghetto of Budapest, they had been given a reason to hope that they would not be murdered by the Nazi empire.

If it hadn’t been for this surrender, my chances of having this visit with you would be non-existent. I was born nine years and three months after VE Day.

On Monday of this week, on the 78th anniversary of a critically important day in the lives of millions of families whose ancestors fought against the Nazis in Europe and families whose ancestors were mass murdered in Europe, a tape of the former podcaster, now the premier of Alberta, was released. , Danielle Smith, courting his anti-vax supporters, telling them she wasn’t wearing a poppy.

He rejected the symbol of patriotic sacrifice in both world wars because he felt Canada’s leaders had not learned the lessons of the war and were behaving like the dictator who started World War II. He went further and said that those people who took the vaccine were blindly following the government just like those who thoughtlessly followed Hitler. How many sheep in Alberta were vaccinated? Seventy-five percent of them, said the then not-yet-prime minister, in comments recorded just a year and a half ago.

My paternal grandmother’s life ended when she was in her early forties in the serial killer’s furnace at Auschwitz. I never got to meet her.

But my maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, survived in a different concentration camp. The Nazis were killing her at work. But my emaciated maternal grandmother was released a short time before she became physically useless as slave labor and she would surely have been killed. That was 78 years ago, when Hitler’s vision of world domination was crumbling due to the heroism of Canadian soldiers and their allies.

My maternal grandmother told me as little as humanly possible about her captivity in the Nazi concentration camp, but the numbers on the tattoo on her arm told me a lot as a child.

Every time I saw that tattoo, my curiosity was piqued.

One thing he told me repeatedly was to always express gratitude whenever you have the opportunity to work with the Canadian Forces.

She felt that she owed her life and that of her daughter to the sacrifices made by the Canadians and their allies. Was she wearing a poppy? Absolutely! I cannot imagine how she would have personally reacted to a Canadian elected official who disrespects the most visible symbol of Canadian sacrifice.

And this brings us back to this month’s Alberta provincial election.

The fight to preserve Canadian democracy has many chapters. One of these is being written in Alberta, where a prime minister is recorded as saying that three quarters of the population were ready to abandon democracy and vote for tyranny by going for the jab.

I think there may be some Manitoba eyes in this column who share a similar thought. I am not here to convince you that you are wrong.

But I swear on my maternal grandmother’s grave that comparisons between vaccination and Nazification are the product of disordered thinking. If Conservative candidates want to exploit this vile nonsense for political gain, federally or provincially, they will be pulling Danielle Smith, humiliating her fellow Conservatives.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commentator and podcaster.

charles@charlesadler.com