Canadian Patriotism

 

Trump's boorish and deranged statements about taking over Canada (as well as Greenland, Panama, Gaza, etc.,) have sent shock waves across this country.  One response has been mindless flag-waving and chest-thumping about resistance to the USA's bullying.  People who yawned at stephen harper's disembowelment of all the traditions of our parliamentary pseudo-democracy, and at Canadian troops being complicit in torture in Afghanistan, and Canada's support for Israel's genocide of the Palestinians, are now falling all over themselves expressing their devotion to whatever vague notion the word "Canada" has to them.

But Canada is ten times smaller than the USA in population, economy and, probably twenty times smaller in terms of military might.  The only thing that will save us from the USA is if Trump's erratic policies sink their economy before the sanctions kill ours.  

One thing that might give Trump pause at assimilating us is that he'd be creating a 51st state of around 40 million people, most of whom would vote for the Democratic Party.  But, then again, it's an open question as to whether Trump will allow elections four years from now.  (If he's not dead from some sort of heart disease in four years.)

At some point since this all started I thought that one could argue that this validates the foreign policy school of thought called "realism" wherein all states (countries) are independent, autonomous actors in a lawless environment, and which have no permanent friends, or principles or ideals other than survival.  A "realist" might say that Canada erred in trusting too much in friendly relations with the USA, what with all our shared cultural and political values, our economic integration, and numerous instances of past cooperation.  All that, plus the supposed thing called "International Law" that forbids one state from conquering another, was supposed to make us "safe."

But I think "realism" remains an arid, stupid political philosophy.  An individual who worries only about personal survival at any cost, and personal gain at the expense of others, and for whom all interpersonal interactions are transactional, would be considered a narcissistic sociopath.  Those idiot neo-cons in Washington DC pursuing their insane schemes to weaken rivals and dominate underlings and causing wars that other people have to fight and die in, show themselves as having no values or morals worthy of the name.  The hollowness of their lives and their policies inevitably leads to one disgusting atrocity after another and makes the USA an increasingly hated place.

But the alternative isn't the "liberal internationalism" of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.  Because that whole scheme was about pursuing, first and foremost, the preservation of a USA-dominated international capitalist system.  One that assisted the old European imperialists in maintaining their mini-empires so as to sustain them in the struggle against the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.  As such it was morally flawed and inhuman.  That was the system of IMF structural adjustment programs and "free trade" deals that entrenched the rights of corporations over human beings and democracy.

Canadian politicians, for the most part, adhered to this capitalist-imperialist system of hypocrisy and violence and now they find themselves casting about for allies and alternatives, bleating about our sovereignty one minute before returning to their support for Israel's annihilation of Palestine the next minute.  All the crimes I've been condemning for years at this blog; colonialism, inequality, anti-democracy, state violence, imperialism, racism, ... are part and parcel of the "liberal internationalism" or "the rules-based international order" that these vapid Liberals and shit-head Conservatives embrace.

The current crop of political leaders and business elites probably aren't up to the job of defending Canada.  This moment of crisis demands an "all hands on deck" and "everything for the struggle" mentality.  And what we have (aside from the  continentalists who have been surreptitiously pursuing integration for decades now) are bloated, self-centered, inefficient oligarchic corporate entities and family dynasties, our Westons and Thompsons and our Rogers Telecom and our banks, who don't want their little empires opened up to US-American competition.  These oligarchs and their political servants of air-head mediocrities are completely incapable of the nation-building, the independent foreign policy, the diplomacy, needed save Canadian independence.  They'll be more focused on preserving what they have, accommodating their new US-American overlords and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.  (All the while price-gouging us for whatever we have left that they can take.)

Personally, after living through Canadians' acquiesence to stephen harper's serial assaults on our traditions, and our collective indifference to torture, and our racist, colonial abuse of the First Nations, and our laziness and apathy and hypocrisy and cowardice and racist glee in the face of Israel's nazi-like behaviour in Palestine, ... I'm not all that worked up about Canada's future.  But I still don't want us to become part of the USA.