While reading the furious (if often contradictory) denunciations in the New York Times and elsewhere of the right-of-center Stephen Harper government’s plans to build in Ottawa a Memorial to the Victims of Communism (it’s either too “immense” for such a modest city or too “low-profile” for such a significant site), I never learned, until one of my commenters pointed it out, that Harper government is simultaneously sponsoring the construction of a nearby National Holocaust Monument, of generally similar style and size, with a slightly larger budget.

Here’s a mockup view of the “controversial” Victims of Communism memorial in the Canadian capital:

And here’s the mock-up view of the completely non-controversial Daniel Libeskind National Holocaust Monument not far away, near the National War Museum:

And, when I go to look up the Harper government’s write-ups of the two projects, it turns out the Canadian government puts them together on a single webpage:

In other words, the Harper government is treating the two memorials as a tandem. The Holocaust memorial has a budget planned to be maybe 50% larger, while the Victims of Communism might get a larger site, but then much of that is being preserved as a lawn, while the Holocaust site is being landscaped to repel people wanting to eat lunch or sunbathe. The Holocaust gets a site closer to tourists, the Communism gets a site closer to government workers. The Holocaust monument is expected to be finished by the end of 2015 while “key elements” of the Communism memorial will be finished by the fall of 2015. And so forth.

It seems pretty fair and even-handed. Now that’s traditionally how politics is done: you package a couple of give-aways to a couple of voter blocs together, because for your opponents to attack one would be seen, in effect, as attacking the other. Reciprocity. I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine. We’re all in this together, etc.

But, less and less does that kind of reciprocal thinking come naturally to 21st Century pundits. Almost nobody on the Internet seems to have noticed the obvious linkage between the two projects.

These days, discourse gets more and more childish: there are just Good Guys and Bad Guys. The WWE has a more nuanced view of moral principles than the NYT.