The Tin Pot March Of Petty Despots

 The Liberals don't know it but they govern by despotic rule.

Voters understand this less.

We believe we're somehow shielded from becoming a despotic country.

But Justin Trudeau was right about one thing: This country has no inner-core identity'. That it's a post-national state. Meaning, it can be moulded in his - or anyone's image - a Fresca delight for cultural and political totalitarians and authoritarians. 

One need only read the comments at places like the CBC or other left-wing outlets or observe the Twitter accounts of Canadians who vote Liberal or NDP. They're generally the ones in masks proclaiming 'Proud Canadian' in their tagline.

They then usually proceed to regurgitate the usual tired and stale trivial tropes that have come to litter what passes off as 'identity' here. They declare pride in 'public health' (a phenomenon that seems to only happen here and nowhere else), engage in shallow and reactionary anti-Americanism and consume Canadian art for its own sake listening only to the CBC as if that passes the Canadian purity test.

Quebec, to its credit, is not as lost as Canada, but it exhibits its own brand of parochial faux-identitarianism. 

But that's all just a facade our pride and nationalism. 

We will sing the praises of the CFL until blue in the face but if the NFL came to annex the league, Canadians would embrace it faster than a Montana-Rice TD rout.

I've been hearing the same nauseating songs of praise since I became politically aware in the 1980s. For a time I partook in the pride fest wondering why Canadian weren't more into Canada. But as time went on, I became increasingly aware the country just believes itself to be great. No work was and is needed to nourish and maintain it. It was handed a country through a BNA Act and that was that. Love multiculturalism because, well, because we said so.

We could never become Nazis. Or despots. Or anything so Latino or Hunnish.

We're Canada. We love freedom. And democracy. Sorta.

Don't you see?

Even our so-called intellectual classes get wrapped up in its own jingoism. Andrew Coyne has a little Ukraine flag in his Twitter bio.

That'll learn 'em.

Logos? More like pogos up our noses.

We Canadians know despots when we see 'em and Putin needs to be defeated because we did it before in 1945. Except then it was Nazis. And communists were our allies. Wait. Isn't Ukraine run by violent, corrupt authoritarian Nazis?

Whaaa?

Shhhhh.

By the 1990s I had become disillusioned; even irritated by our immature antics in empty pride. 

The whole damn mindset here can be summed up with the line 'We're not American'.

For years, I wondered if I was being too hard or was wrong about my assessment of Canada.

Then 'Because it's 2015' came.

And then 2020.

The onslaught on democracy and civil liberties has been relentless. Clouded by Covid fears (of which Coyne - again - is a slave to), we can't see the medical tyranny in our midst.

A country with no values has no soul.

And Canada showed itself to lack any kind of intestinal fortitude in the face of a virus being used to toxically erode our democratic institutions. 

It was one big Homer scream here.

To this day I'm treated to the cackles of journalists and MPs who see nothing run in the catastrophic decision to lockdown and its unintended consequences.

Covid you know, brah. Now check these pyjamas.

You hear and read their contempt for anyone who challenged the narrative. How dare they? How dare you? These fake trucker protests.

The contempt reached a shocking level listening to Lametti at the theatrical public hearings examining the use of the Emergencies Act. These are Cabinet Ministers insisting on defending the indefensible and being defiant like petulant despots sneering at Canadians.

Would they speak this way of violent BLM protestors? Of course not. We're woke. 

Not a nation of men and values.

I didn't see a man in Lametti et al. I saw petty tyrants. With degrees. Lemetti graduated in Smug with honours.

Living in the spoil and comforts of a prosperous nation thanks to its proximity to the United States acting very much like immature adults in arrested development given a balloon and a country they never had to fight for.

But wait! What about Ukraine!?

No inner core values.

Or principles.

That's why we're sticklers for rules. 'I don't like these passports, they're, but rules are rules.'  Even if it means you can't see dying loved ones. 

Uh-huh. 

Ukraine, Yes, let's pretend we're freedom fighters vicariously through a vassal state.

Our political classes and the people who vote for them just don't get it.

See Bill C-11. Despite Senator Richards' excellent plea asking why are we even bothering with it, the Senate passed it. I listened to some of the questions posed to Richards. 

Whoosh! They didn't get his nuanced and subtle but elegant arguments. References to Cicero, Animal Farm and Tolstoy weren't enough.

We're Canada, remember?

We have public health. It's not much, but gosh darn it, it's ours! It's a Canadian thing.

Unlike those dirty Americans.

We can't heed to lessons of history because we didn't forge our own history. We will have to go through the pain it looks like.

Canada has become a rudderless, woke wasteland of ideologues dancing praying for some kind of god to come down upon us to thank us for being Canadian. 

Make no mistake about it. Democracy and freedom are on the defensive if not on the run. And it's not because of Russia.

Here. Check the mirror.

I've spent many hours reading the period 1900-1945. I've read books, periodicals and primary sources. I see many troubling lessons that we're not heeding.

'It can't happen here' was a fine novel by Sinclair Lewis and perhaps every Canadian should read it. Or C.S. Lewis. Or Hayek. Or any of the splendid novels and works of non-fiction from that period. They laid it all out for us for what's to come.

And it has come. 

Do you think people at the time weren't responding to people who were warning of the Bolsheviks or Hitler with tin foil hat memes?

They were. Believe it or not. They didn't believe it could happen in Germany or Russia either. 

Or Italy for that matter.

No one wants to believe bad things can happen to good people and places.

But they do.

All the time. Tyranny is the natural default position of history. The American Founding Fathers understood this all too well. This is why they constructed and stacked their constitutional Republic and the foundation it lays upon with as many bricks from the past. They incorporated all the facets and legacy that composed of Dutch and British Parliamentarianism with the Republicanism of Rome and lessons of classical Rome and Greece.

The Americans forged a nation.

We didn't.

Since 2020, listen carefully to the rhetoric and actions under Justin Trudeau.

We've never been closer to tyranny.

We have despotic rule. You can have the appearance of a democracy and still slide into a dictatorship. Only difference is our tin potters won't wear army fatigues. 

What part of the constant flouting of the rule of law, application of state of exception, sleazy scandals, excessive use of Orders in Council, push for biosurveillance, invocation of martial law and freezing of livelihoods don't we understand? 

Are we going to be the very people who watch neighbour hauled off to a quarantine camp on the suspicion of being sick and still stubbornly refuse to see what's before us? 

The country is not on a good track and in many ways is indeed broken.

Justin Trudeau laid the foundation by weakening the country by dividing us.

There are millions who have been singled out and made to no longer feel Canadian. There is a refusal to reconsider how we treated a segment of the population. In the process, the international community is asking the world 'needs more Canada'. In fact, we may need less of it. Canada is now a cautionary tale of how things can go awry and astray in just a matter of a decade. 

The mandates and the Covid response made sure of that. Our courts cemented it.

Our executive, judiciary and even media are operating in a silo within a silo. 

Nah, nah, nah. We can't hear you!

Like Justin, Andrew is right about one thing. We exist in "parallel universes" now.

I respect what the truckers did. I hold no contempt for them. Moreover, and more importantly, I reject the entire Covid and Ukraine narratives. Pseudoscientific hysterics rooted in abject fear with the former and blathering faux-righteous nonsense with the latter. 

I can tell you, I'm not interested in living in yours Andrew. 

Let's dance.

Once you have a divided people with no bonds to keep them together and no shared values or principles (which is what we have), you have a country ripe for the final coup de grace.

It will happen here.