Well, perhaps to call it fascist is just a bit over the line. None the less, the very term implies a culture of xenophobia. You’ll have to excuse my harsh reaction to this phrase, but, being a veteran of these forums, and many others on the topics of politics and culture and all that, I’ve seen quite a lot of moronic, self serving, exclusionary philosophies which people like to sum up in single phrases. “Cultural sovereignty” for me, paints the idea of a world view where all of Canada has this idea of what it is to be Canadian, and what a Canadian should think say and do, and that there are hostile foreign forces trying to change that and take that away from you. In that sense it’s not unlike phrases like “race traitor” or “mongreization of the races”, some pretty ugly words for some objectively meaningless philosophies, I think you’d agree.
My beef is mainly that it’s a very polarizing way of thinking, we have “us” who all thing and act the same way, and we have “them” who we can’t be allowed to speak with very much or somehow that beautiful gap between us will lessen somehow. It completely ignores the fact that if the prevailing social paradigm (or Zeitgeist) of Canada is to change through cultural infancies bought via American TV, or any foreign media, then that is going to be a direct result of the people of Canada deciding that that’s the sort of thing they want to see. To say that there’s some “cultural sovereignty” to give heed to is to imply that your leaders know better than yourselves how to live your every day life, and what your morals and values should be. Furthermore it implies that some vague golden ideal of Canada’s past is something that should be reached for, rather than any natural Canadian future; this is the classic conservative paradigm: prefer any past to any future. I must admit it’s a little strange hearing all of this out of Canada, as generally, especially in America, we think of it as being quite liberal.
Obviously the idea of cultural sovereignty (The right of the government to perform social engineering on it’s citizens so that they will conform to some foolish golden ideal, which has nothing to do with the people themselves keeping their culture intact) and the banning of Satellite dishes to pick up American broadcasts go hand in hand. I find both of them to be insulting and appalling, this simply isn’t how any free society should operate.
Edit: Reading through my post I thought it might be wise of me to post that my view is not based on a sense of wounded pride that Canadians would reject American TV specifically. I’ve got no great attachment to it, really, and don’t assign any stupid national pride to it just because it happens to be American (I have an Australian friend who attaches his loyalty to anything Australian regardless of what a piece of crap it may be, and I find his reasonless loyalty a bit amusing). I don’t really even bother to watch that much of it, because I realize that a lot of it is just trash and stupidness, but I’ve got absolutely no qualms with anyone who does enjoy watching TV, and think it rather unnecessary to say that just because I don’t particularly enjoy it then no one should be able to.
