As a madman who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, So is the man that deceiveth his neighbor, and saith, Am not I in sport? (Proverbs 26:18-19)
There was a
dinner once, one of those formal affairs that people pay to attend and where
they are forced to listen to a seemingly endless program of speeches. At this one, the audience was about evenly
divided between Canadians and Americans and they were intermixed among the
various tables. At the table where the
speakers were sitting a debate broke out over concepts and styles of
humour. One speaker took the position
that Canadians and Americans were indistinguishable in their senses of
humour. Another argued that Canadian
humour was distinct from American humour.
The debate
continued through a couple of the formal speeches until the second debater, the
one who contended for a distinction between Canadian and American humour, was on
dock to speak next. At this point he
said that he would settle the matter.
“I’m up next”, he said. “I bet
you that I can separate the Canadians from the Americans in the room with a
single joke.”
His
interlocutor agreed to the bet and the speaker ahead of him concluded his
speech. “The ones who laugh are the
Canadians” he said before going to the podium.
“Ladies and
gentlemen” he said “I’m afraid I have some bad news. The world will end at 7:30 tonight. 8:00 in Newfoundland”.
The preceding
joke has, of course, been made largely obsolete by the demise of broadcast
television and the explosion of new communications technology as well as by the
waning number of Canadians who listen to or watch the CBC in any media
format. Today, the “8:00 in
Newfoundland” joke would be more effective at distinguishing between older and
younger generations of Canadians than distinguishing between Canadians and
Americans.
Fox News
host Tucker Carlson maintains that we Canadians have no sense of humour and
cannot take a joke. Is he right?
The
backstory to this begins with a remark he made towards the end of last month on
“Tucker Carlson Today.” This is the
show he does on Fox Nation, the station’s streaming platform. It has different content and a different
format from “Tucker Carlson Tonight”,his weekday evening show on the station’s
main cable/satellite platform. He was
joking with a guest about our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead. In this context, he brought up all the
money the United States is wasting on the Ukraine and asked “Why are we not
sending an armed force north to liberate Canada from Trudeau? And I mean it”.
This came
to the attention of Matthew Green, the Member representing Hamilton Centre in
the House of Commons, who raised a motion on Tuesday, 26 January, calling upon
the House to unanimously condemn Carlson’s remark. Green and the party he represents, the
socialist NDP, apparently took the Fox host’s remark as a serious
proposal. The motion did not receive
the unanimous consent that was sought and was defeated.
This
prompted a response from Carlson on his show the following Wednesday. “We don’t want to be too picayune or
anything, but we did not suggest the armed forces liberate Canada” he said, either having forgotten
his exact words or attempting to get the maximum mileage out of the distinction
between a suggestion and a question.
Then, after a few remarks about everyone who cares about rights having
fled Canada, Canada having become a dictatorship, the United States not liking
dictatorships, and the like, he said that there is “so little going on
in Canada, like civil liberties, that if you tell a joke about Canada, they go
bonkers”.
Green and his party, who have not let the matter drop but
taken it from the floor of the House of Commons to their webpage where they are
asking people to sign an online petition telling Tucker Carlson that his “hate”
isn’t welcome in Canada, have responded very foolishly. Even though he said “And I mean it” the
overall laughing, flippant, tone of the conversation rather contradicted these
words which he seems to have used much in the same manner in which teenagers,
college students, progressive activists and other empty-headed twits use the
word “literally”, i.e., as a sort of emphatic punctuation rather than with its
actual meaning. Carlson was
joking. It was an extremely tasteless
joke. Jokes about invading someone
else’s country belong in the same category as jokes about murdering someone
else’s children or raping his wife. It
is best not to bestow dignity upon such by acknowledging them, much less making
an issue out of them in the halls of Parliament.
Everything
I just said applies to the joke that Tucker Carlson told intentionally. There is another joke in his words, one
which I rather suspect he told unwittingly.
It is a much better joke.
It is a
joke to think of the United States “liberating” another country. From
the moment they staged their Revolution in the Eighteenth Century the Americans
have been talking incessantly about “freedom” and “liberating” people. All this is and all it has ever been is
enough hot air to float a fleet of Chinese spy balloons. The Americans fought their Revolution to
“free” themselves from the most liberal government in the world at the time. That’s liberal in the older and better sense
of the word which referred to the belief that government power needed to be
restrained and limited to protect the personal rights and freedoms of the
governed. The American revolutionaries
falsely accused the British government of tyrannizing them despite that
government’s having taken a largely laissez-faire approach to them, because it
would not let them forcibly convert the French Roman Catholics of Quebec to
English-speaking Protestantism and would not let them go into Indian territory
and take it by force. When, about
thirty years after their Revolution the Americans did indeed try to “liberate”
Canada they found that the Canadians correctly understood their “liberation” to
mean “conquest” and preferred to remain in the British Empire. The Canadians fought alongside the British
army and successfully repelled the American invaders. In this period, between the Americans
having attained independence from the British Empire in the eighteenth century
and British North America’s Confederation into the Dominion of Canada in the
late nineteenth century, we who remained in the British Empire generally
enjoyed greater freedom, less regulation, and more decentralized governance
than the Americans did under their new federal republic.
Before proceeding to comment on the United States’ next big “liberation” project I would like to expand upon the last sentence of the last paragraph by saying with regards to the relative freedom of Canada and the United States that the nineteenth century was not the last time in which the case could be made for Canada being the freer of the two countries. It made news last month when the Frazer Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the United States released the 2022 edition of the Human Freedom Index and Canada was in thirteenth place – a drop from her previous spot of sixth, and the first time since 2012 that Canada has fallen below the top ten. In the 2022 edition of the Index of Economic Freedom Canada ranks lower yet, at fifteenth place. Undoubtedly the present Liberal government has contributed significantly to the decline in Canadian freedom – the compilers of the Human Freedom Index say that a large part of this was due to Canada’s harsh pandemic measures and while provincial governments, mostly Conservative, contributed to this, the main push for lockdowns, forced masking, and vaccine mandates came from the Dominion government. Note, however, where the United States stands on both of these Indexes. She is twenty-third on the Human Freedom Index and twenty-fifth on the Index of Economic Freedom. In other words on both she is ten spots below Canada. If we switch from discussing freedom in general terms to specific freedoms examples of freedoms that seem to have stronger constitutional protection in the United States than in Canada can be found. Among fundamental freedoms, freedom of speech is the example that stands out and among auxiliary freedoms, the freedom to own and carry arms. This, however, merely makes the rankings in these indexes that deal with freedom in more general terms all the more striking. These relative rankings are not an anomaly of the 2022 editions. Nor can they be explained by pro-Trudeau bias. The Cato Institute and Frazer Institute are libertarian think tanks and the Index of Economic Freedom is published by the Heritage Foundation – the foremost American conservative think tank. If there is any bias it would be in the opposite direction. Undoubtedly such facts will cause some sort of mental breakdown among those incapable of distinguishing between talking the most and the loudest about freedom on the one hand and actually possessing and practicing it on the other.
After
failing to conquer Canada in the War of 1812, the next big “liberation” project
undertaken by the United States followed upon the organization of the
Republican Party in 1854 and the first election of a nominee of that party to
the office of President of the United States in 1860. Thirteen states found Abraham Lincoln to be
such an insufferable ass that upon his election they decided to exercise the
right of secession which the founders of their republic had written into their
constitution after the original thirteen colonies had illegally seceded from
the British Empire. The breakaway
states formed their own federal republic, the Confederate States of America,
which the United States promptly invaded and conquered, employing brutal
scorched earth tactics in what remains the bloodiest war in their history. The
states that wanted to secede were subjugated and those that had remained in the
Union found themselves, alongside the conquered South, now saddled with a
federal government that was exponentially more centralized, more powerful, and
more intrusive than it had been before.
Naturally, the American government spun this as a war of “liberation”
or, to use the synonym that was in vogue at the time, “emancipation”, i.e., of
the slaves, and to be sure, after the war they passed the Thirteenth Amendment
abolishing most types of slavery. It is
interesting, however, how that in his first Inaugural Address Lincoln had
promised to do the exact opposite of that if the seceding states returned to
the Union, whereas the Confederates had offered to abolish slavery if the
United States would let them leave. One
might be tempted to think that the abolition of slavery, the accomplishment of
which, oddly enough, required a deadly internecine war nowhere other than in
the United States, was merely a pretext and that the true purpose of the war
was to concentrate the political power that had previously been diffused
through the American states in the American federal government in Washington D.
C.
When the
United States decided to enter World War I on the side of Great Britain, France
and the other Allies their president at the time, Woodrow Wilson, sold it to
Congress as a war to “make the world safe for democracy”. Since such idealistic romantic drivel had
nothing to do with the war as it had been fought up to that point Wilson had to give the war a
makeover and inserted into the conditions for peace at the end of the war that
the German and Austrian emperors abdicate their thrones and these countries
become republics. This boneheaded
blunder created the vacuum that two decades later was exploited by a man who
consolidated both republics into one, made himself dictator, and set out to
conquer Europe. Once again Britain and
the Commonwealth and France went to war with Germany and once again the United
States joined us after her morally handicapped president figured out a way of maneuvering
Japan into bombing his own country. The
Allies invaded Nazi-occupied Europe on D-Day and for once the United States
took part in an invasion that actually was a liberation as the Allies drove the
Nazi occupiers out of Western Europe.
Eastern Europe did not fare so well.
There it was the Soviet Union that drove the Wehrmacht back to Germany
but rather than liberate these countries it enslaved them to Communism. This was an outcome that the other Allies
did not want but was forced upon them by American president Franklin Roosevelt,
the bitch to Joseph Stalin’s butch.
At the end
of the Second World War, therefore, the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe up
to and including East Germany. Soon thereafter the Chinese Civil War would
start up again and the Chinese Communists, whom the Americans had insisted must
be part of any Chinese government that wished to have good relations with the
United States, drove their main rivals the Chinese Nationalists off the
mainland which they then turned into the People’s Republic of China. The Americans had brought the Second World War
to an end with the unconscionable act of actually using the new weapon of mass
destruction they had invented in the Manhattan Project to kill thousands of
civilians in a country that had been trying to negotiate peace terms for a year. By the end of the decade the Soviets had
obtained this technology and the nuclear arms race was on. In the Cold War, the United States, now the
leading power in the West, maintained military bases in Western Europe and a
nuclear arsenal to deter invasion from the Communist bloc. The nuclear arms race, however, meant that
if the USA and the USSR were to directly attack each other both would end up
destroyed and the whole world along with them.
Therefore, while the Soviets and Americans both sponsored revolutionary
groups that sought to take over the governments of third party countries – and
each described the goal of the groups they sponsored as “liberation” – neither
was willing to risk the direct confrontation that would bring about Mutually
Assured Destruction. Accordingly,
military ventures in which the United States came to the assistance of someone
fighting against actual Communist forces, such as the Vietnam War tended to end
in failure or at best stalemate as in Korea.
At the same time they used the Cold War as a pretext to overthrow the
governments of several countries – Guatemala in 1954 for example – for reasons
of their own that had nothing to do with Communism. The countries they so “liberated” were hardly
better off for it
This last
item, that the United States used the Cold War as a pretext to “liberate”,
i.e., overthrow the governments of several countries for reasons that had
nothing to do with containing or rolling back the spread of Soviet Communism,
is the germ of truth in the interpretation of the Cold War popular with
leftists of the Noam Chomsky variety.
Otherwise, this interpretation which treats the Soviet threat itself as
having been non-existent, a fiction devised to cloak American capitalist
imperialism, is wrong and laughably so. Just as laughable, however, was the idea of
the United States as the great protector of the free world against Soviet
tyranny. In many ways this is comparable
to a mob protection racket. You know
how these work. The mob boss sends some
of the boys over to a local business where they say “real nice place you’ve got
here, it would be a shame if something happened to it” and collect a payoff
from the business owner for protection from themselves. The Communist threat was real alright, but it
came with a “Made in the USA” stamp on it.
I pointed out earlier how the United States’ having demanded the abolition
of the German and Austrian monarchies created the vacuum that enabled Adolf
Hitler to rise to power. While the
American government did not have the opportunity of overthrowing the Russian
Tsar in the way she drove the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg dynasties from their
thrones since Tsarist Russia was on the side of the Allies, her
Wall Street bankers financed the Bolshevik Revolution that transformed Orthodox
Tsarist Russia and her Empire into the Communist, atheist, Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics with the knowledge and approval of Woodrow
Wilson. As hard as it is for those
raised in the Cold War with its dualistic mythos of the capitalist United
States as the champion of light and freedom against the Communist Soviet Union
the avatar of darkness and bondage to wrap their heads around the fact in the
first half of the Twentieth Century right up to the start of the Cold War the
attitude of the American government and indeed the American establishment in
general towards the Bolsheviks and their regime was adulatory and supportive. The Americans of that era saw the Bolsheviks
as being brothers-in-arms in the common cause of Modern progress. The difference between the Communist
economic system and their own was less important to such Americans than their
similarities. Both the American and the
Bolshevik regimes had been born out of revolution. The Americans had rebelled against their
king and established a federal republic, the Bolsheviks had murdered the Tsar
and his family and established a federation of republics. The Americans in their Bill of Rights had
prohibited church establishment in their First Amendment, the Bolsheviks
declared Soviet Russia to be officially atheist and sought to eradicate the
church. The Bolshevik approach was more
murderous than the American, but both saw monarchy and the established church
as that from which people needed to be liberated. Both saw revolution as the means of
liberation. Both had a linear
progressive or Whig view of history as moving from a dark past to a bright,
shining, future and both had a materialistic faith in man’s ability to solve
his problems through science and technology.
The United States was one of the first, if not the first, Western
country to enact most of the planks of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. For
example, the second and fifth planks (“a heavy progressive or graduated income
tax” and “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”) were implemented
in the United States in 1913, the year before World War I broke out (1). FDR’s
fawning and obsequious behavour towards the worst of the Soviet dictators was
not just some sick idiosyncrasy of his own, it was this earlier, positive,
American attitude towards Bolshevism taken to its extreme. While Americans quickly learned the true
nature of the Soviet regime with the onset of the Cold War elements of the
earlier attitude persisted until 1959 when the Americans helped put Fidel
Castro into power in Cuba. This too
they thought of as an act of “liberation”.
When it
comes to freedom or liberty, Americanism is largely zeal without
knowledge. The idea of revolution as
the means of liberation is nonsense to anyone familiar with the history of
revolutions the outcome of which is generally tyranny. A stable and secure civil order is the
prerequisite of freedom. Revolutions are
by their very nature inimical to stability and security which furthermore are
the properties of long established institutions not of newly minted ones. The new regime that emerges from a revolution
has seized power, but has not attained authority and so must rely upon naked
power to govern. The very word tyranny
itself originally spoke of usurpation, an ancient testimony to the fact that
power that is seized is power that is abused.
The equation of freedom with democracy or the republican form of
government is also nonsense. Every
dictator in the history of the world has come to power by claiming to speak for
the people as their voice and champion and the most brutal dictators have been
those with the masses behind them.
Every Communist state has been republican in form as was Nazi
Germany. With only a couple of
exceptions the freest countries of the last century and indeed all of history
have had parliamentary governments under reigning monarchs. This is hardly surprising given what we just
stated about a stable and secure civil order being the prerequisite of freedom
and stability and security being traits that come with long establishment. Monarchy is the most ancient and stable of
government institutions. Our American
friends and neighbours are quite ass-backwards on all this.
Tucker
Carlson appears to think that Canada has become a dictatorship under the
premiership of Captain Airhead. Is he
right?
Captain
Airhead certainly has a dictatorial mindset.
This was evident in the way he led his own party before he became Prime
Minister and it has been evident in the way he has governed Canada since. It was most on display in his response to
the Freedom Convoy last year. Rather
than meet with and speak to those who were loudly but peacefully protesting his
vaccine mandates he became the first Prime Minister in the Dominion’s history
to invoke the Emergencies Act. His
father had been widely thought to have acted dictatorially in 1970 when he
invoked the War Measures Act to deal with terrorists who were kidnapping and
murdering people. Captain Airhead
invoked the successor legislation to the War Measures Act to crush a peaceful
protest and moreover did so when the only aspect of the protest that was
anything more than a nuisance to other Canadians, the partial blocking of
traffic on important trade routes, had already been dealt with by local law
enforcement without the use of emergency powers. This was clearly the act of a Prime Minister
who had lost whatever respect he may ever have had for the limits that tradition,
constitutional law, or even common decency place on the powers of his office. He froze the bank accounts of ordinary
Canadians who were fed up with draconian pandemic measures and had donated a
few dollars to the protest against such, he sent armed and mounted policemen in
to thuggishly brutalize the protestors, and threw the protest’s organizers in
prison. Then, nine days after it was
invoked he rescinded it. However much he
might think and act like a dictator, Canada’s constitution still works
sufficiently to prevent him from actually being one. After the Prime Minister declares a public
order emergency both chambers of Parliament have to confirm the invoking of the
Emergencies Act. Captain Airhead was able to obtain such
confirmation from the House of Commons when he and the leader of the socialist
party shut down debate and whipped their caucuses into voting for it. The Senate, however, was not about to rubber
stamp the Emergencies Act. They debated
it vigorously and it would seem that it was because he did not have enough
votes in the Senate to obtain confirmation that the Prime Minister revoked the
Act and voluntarily gave up his emergency powers rather than face the humiliation
of being stripped of them by the chamber of sober second thought. Another aspect of our constitution that
likely contributed to the revoking of the Act is the fact that Canada is a
federation. The Prime Minister had
consulted with the provincial premiers before invoking the Emergencies Act, had
received the general response that it was a bad idea, and a few days before he
revoked it a couple of provincial governments announced that they would be
filing legal challenges to it.
Could this
sort of thing ever happen in the United States?
The year
before the Freedom Convoy was the year in which the United States swore in a
new president, Mr. Magoo. To secure his
inauguration, they sent in thousands of National Guardsmen and other armed
forces and turned Washington DC into a military occupied zone. Rather poor imagery for a country that
boasts of its peaceful transfers of power but this was deemed necessary because
of an incident that had taken place two weeks prior on the Feast of
Epiphany. That was the day that the
American Congress was scheduled to meet to confirm the results of the previous
year’s presidential election. These
were highly irregular results to say the least.
The incumbent, even though he increased his vote count from the previous
election and carried almost all the bellwether states and countries, ordinarily
near infallible predictors of an incumbent victory, apparently lost to Mr.
Magoo, who’s having been nominated by his own party was somewhat difficult to
explain given how poorly he had done in the primaries. At any rate, the incumbent, Donald the
Orange, believed he had good cause to suspect foul play. As Congress convened on Epiphany, he held a
massive rally of his supporters and aired his grievances. The rally concluded with a protest march, and
a portion of the protestors broke away from the main group and entered the
Capitol. This was declared to be an “insurrection”,
“storming of the Capitol”, “coup”, “occupation” and “attack” and the powers
that be in America continue to insist upon the use of this language although
the facts don’t seem to warrant it. It
is a strange sort of insurrection whose participants feel no need to arm
themselves to the teeth and mostly just walk around in weird costumes and take
selfies. In the fighting that broke out
as the police went in to clear and secure the Capitol there were several
injuries on both sides but the protestors clearly got the worst of it. One of them was shot by the police.
Captain
Airhead and his cabinet in framing their response to the Freedom Convoy were
obviously seeking to evoke the image of what had occurred in Washington DC on
the previous year’s Epiphany. In both
countries these events were followed up by public inquiries. Note the difference, however. In the Dominion of Canada, the focus of the
public inquiry was the government’s response to the Freedom Convoy protest, her
use of the Emergencies Act, and the question of whether or not it was justified
under the terms of the Act itself. The
cabinet, including the Prime Minister himself, were essentially put on trial,
held account for their actions, and subjected to grilling
cross-examination. In the American
republic, the focus of the ongoing inquiry by the US House Select Committee has
been on Mr. Magoo’s predecessor whom they are desperately trying to blame and
prosecute for the “insurrection”.
So thank
you for the laugh, Tucker, but no, we are far better off and far more free as
subjects of His Majesty Charles III here in the Dominion of Canada, even with
that dimwitted moron Captain Airhead as Prime Minister, than we would be “liberated”
by your republic. Let us worry about
Captain Airhead. You have enough
problems of your own with Mr. Magoo.
(1) Canada, by contrast, introduced the income
tax at the end of the War as a measure to pay for it. The income tax here never got as heavy and
progressive as it got in the United States from the 1940s to the early
1960s. From 1944 to 1963 the top
American income tax rate never dropped below 90%. It never made it that high here in
Canada. The Bank of Canada was
chartered in 1934, twenty one years after the United States passed the Federal
Reserve Act.
