Annexation Nation

Canada needs to figure out how the the world works, quickly.

I knew when I wrote the post “Trumped” two weeks back that I would soon be expanding on each section of it. I am starting with this, about the implications of the rise of Trump on Canada. I live here.

It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that, with Trump, the rules in place since 1945 are over. This is as true for Canada as anywhere else. As everywhere else, Canada is going to have to adjust quickly.

However, Canada is very unprepared to do so. Canada, for most of its history, has been stuck in a protective but restricting situation. It remains in a state of arrested development.

This is clear when comparing it to other former British colonies such as Australia. Our political culture is very stunted. We have not developed fully modern institutions.

We have had a lot of trouble building an industrial base. We have an economic elite which does not want that. Canada has always been owned and run by the financial capitalists.

There is always a conflict between industrial and financial capitalists. Usually the financial capitalists prevail. They have run the world for the past eighty years, since Fascism, the militant form of industrialism, was last put down.

Canadian financial imperialists have only been only interested in shipping out the raw materials as profitably as possible. They have been happy to send it to the USA since it replaced Britain as the economic centre of the Atlanticist financial mercantilist empire.

Mercantilism is a term important to this discussion. It is the idea that the wealth of nations comes mainly from trade, which entails powerful financial networks. Global imperial power comes from building networks of captive markets, with only a home country allowed to do advanced manufacturing.

The opposite of mercantilism is productivism. This means an aggressive, expansionist industrialism. This usually produces fascist style political movements.

The USA has been the great home of productivist imperialism. It has, historically, been kept in check by the British empire. That is why the Americans never dared to carry out its idea of “manifest destiny” and annex Canada. Until now.

The Atlanticist empire, led by British Intelligence and J.P. Morgan, gained control over the USA by establishing the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. However, the Atlanticists were subsequently weakened by world war one. They botched that effort to crush Germany and other industrial powers which were not complying with them.

American industrialists led the second industrial revolution in the roaring twenties. That is, finishing out the switch from steam to electricity and internal combustion. Mismanaging the social consequences, and fighting between the two big capitalist factions, led to the great depression of the 1930s.

That, and world war two, led to a weakening of both forms of capitalism for some years. This allowed both Industrialism and socialism to expand in the Atlanticist world. Then after 1975, a particularly aggressive form of financialism began to assert itself.

What is happening now, is that the Atlanticist financial empire has failed. Nationally based, aggressive productivist industrial capitalism is seizing control in many parts of the world. Most worrisome, it has seized control in the USA.

These people want to relaunch American industrially based imperialism; a la Teddy Roosevelt. This is bad news for the world, especially parts close to the USA. There is nothing to hold them in check at the moment. China is the rising power, but not ready just yet to take the Americans on.

So, where Canada has fit into all this has been to just continue as the resource hinterland, shipping out the commodities and being otherwise left with our backward social arrangements. In the post war time, with capitalism restrained somewhat, we partly industrialized. We developed some limited social systems, always inferior to what was developed in most western nations.

As the financialists were gradually able to reassert themselves from the eighties on, we threw away our industrial sector. We went back to shipping out the hogs, logs, gas, and electrons. The oligarchies continued to want only unrestricted access to the American market.

Everything public or social in Canada came under pressure; public health, social welfare, and so on. There was a strict ban on any sort of governmental reform. This might have enhanced the ability of civil society to protect social interests.

Thus, Canada has to this date been strongly controlled by mercantilist financial capitalists, espousing a liberal ideology. We have had outbreaks of a kind of conservatism. We are not heavily industrialized so we do not have a powerful industrial capitalism.

Conservatism in Canada has mostly been based around small scale commodity producers. The basic gripe is always the same. They resent being under the thumb of the Bay Street cartels, the distributors, and being price takers, not price setters.

This is still the issue with the present Conservative wave in Canada. They are more sophisticated than previous waves. Their aim is to break up financial capitalism.

Led by former Prime Minister Steve Harper, they have not only organized internally in Canada. They have created an international organization called IDU, International Democratic Union. While very decentralized, they do have some rules.

One is that they do not attack each other. Especially, they do not gain power in a country and then start attacking other countries. They believe in free trade.

Given this, the reason for the rift between Canadian Conservatives and the Trumpian revolution is obvious. It seems like the Trump people bamboozled their IDU friends about the real aim of their movement. They thought he had discarded these protectionist, “tariff wall” ideas.

This is what Rob Ford was talking about when he said that Trump had stabbed him in the back. There is a split between Canadian ‘resource extraction’ capitalists and American productivist capitalists. This will strongly influence the coming conflict between Canada and the USA.

There is a reason why the Alberta premier has broken with the other screw head leaders of Canada, demanding accommodation with Trump. Alberta’s economy depends very heavily on the oil and gas industry. A culture has developed there, of extreme loyalty to that industry.

Most other extractive industry in Canada is owned by Canadian based firms aligned with global finance. The western Canada oil and gas biz is mostly American owned. Thus, there is also an intense dependency relationship, among some sections of Alberta society, with the USA.

However, the American based oil business has largely abandoned Canada. They are making no new investments. The reaction in Alberta is to try to get them to come back.

They cannot think in any frame but being a gas tank for the USA. All light and wisdom comes from there. But the Alberta economy is now, and will remain, stagnant.

Finally, to the reaction of Canadian financialists to the Trump revolution.

Mark Carney is a Canadian banker. Thus, he is as aligned with global financialism as any political leader could be. He will win the next election or the one following soon after it.

Globalism is in decline and disarray, but it is not destroyed. Canada has always been a bastion for globalism. Thus, we can expect Carney to lead a strong Canadian resistance to Trump.

He is likely to ameliorate some of the degradation of Canadian social structures, to insure the loyalty of the Canadian population in the struggle. He is likely to be able to get the Canadian Conservatives at least partly on side with him in this. They are for free trade, even if that era has passed.

It is amusing to see now much the Canadian right wing has been thrown off by Trump. They are slow to realign themselves. Commentators who had thought they had fully understood Conservatives are also befuddled.

The dumbest of the dumb simply refuse to believe the break between the US and Canada right wing. It has to be a ruse. All these evil machinations are from the Russians.

Trump was recruited by Putin. He is making us lose the Ukraine war. We are about to be taken over by the secret world communist conspiracy; Oops! No, its now the world International Democratic Union gangster conspiracy. Pft!

For well over a century, Canada has been snugly embedded in the centre of the Atlanticist empire. It has been protected from conflict. Now, suddenly it is on the front line of a newly emerging world conflict.

The USA had been the host organism of choice for the Atlanticists. They have fallen apart, and the old American expansionist impulse, suppressed for a century, has burst out again. There is now a world wide realignment against them.

This conflict will supersede other global tensions. It will go on for some time. Canada is still solidly under the control of people, left and right, who do not agree with the expansionist, productivist, new/old American ideology.

The Canadian ruling elite will soon realign itself to face this challenge. They have no respect at all for the Canadian population. However, they will make as much effort as they must, to keep the loyalty of this population.

We can expect to see curbs on the out of control racketeering of some Canadian provinces. Attacks on critical social infrastructure will decline. There will still be strong measures to suppress a serious left from developing.

Canadian patriotism is still a powerful force. It will be appealed to. Globalists do not really like patriotism and nationalism, but do appeal to it when they need to mobilize populations.

A problem is that right now we are in the middle of sorting out which oligarchs will be running government for the next few years. We need a coherent response immediately. We need a strategy, not a series of dumb, reflexive responses.

While all this is unfolding, Canadian popular patriotism is being expressed. Local and provincial politicians are trying to jump in front of this parade. Supermarket food that was assumed to be trucked up from the states is suddenly labelled as grown in Canada.

The American anthem is getting booed at hockey games. The old habit of flying the American flag alongside the Canadian flag so that American visitors will feel welcome, is suspended in most places. Someone might do something impolite to the American flag.

Things are being talked about on Canadian based social media which would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago. People want to immediately halt all trade with the Americans. The most amusing thing is the ones who want to start resisting the American occupation before has happened.

However, the risk of an American invasion of Canada must be taken very seriously. Trump may be a kind of figurehead, but the people behind him are not joking around. The USA still has a huge military and they want it used to enforce American economic interests to the maximum.

To re-emphasize, this is no longer America as the tool of the Atlanticist global empire. This is the McKinley doctrine reemerged after a century of suppression.

The attitude of the new republicans is that the empire suppressed them. They are now reestablishing what they see as their rightful place in the world. The concern is that they have some scope to really act out this idea.

This is in contrast to the way modern empires collapse. The home country adopts a sour grapes posture. Good riddance, the vassal states had really been taking advantage of of us, anyway.

The British were a lot like this. The former colonies did not appreciate all they had left them. The French, now being finally thrown out of Africa, whine that their vassals are not compensating them for all the investments they made. Even the Russians, after the fall of the Soviet Union, talked; “good riddance, these subject states were bleeding us dry.”

However, they no longer had the power to take any revenge on their former subjects, or to try to take new ones. Contrarily, to the nationalist Americans, the ‘manifest destiny’ doctrine is still very real. For a short time, at least, they still have unmatched military potential.

They think Canada belongs inside the USA. This is some unfinished business which should have been taken care of long ago. Oh, yes, and the Panama canal was stolen from them.

Of course, the first line of resistance to this is inside the United States. Much of the MAGA movement had bought into Trump because they wanted the Globalist nonsense around the democratic party done away with; the climate cult, the identity politics, the contempt for the working class. They are ‘free trade’ types of people, who see both tariff wars and ‘kinetic’ wars as abhorrent.

One of the saddest jokes about the advent of Trumpism is all the MAGA people of the older generation. They wanted more traditional values restored. They wanted the world wound back to at least the nineties.

They suddenly realize what they are in for. They are going to get their social security and medicare cut. They will endure massive inflation, erasing the value of their pensions and savings.

Libertarian supporters of Trump are starting to twig that Trumpism is in direct contradiction to their ideology. The Tech Billionaires behind Trump are setting up their monopolies. Tariffs and military force do not fit with market economics.

So, the Trumpians will have a fierce fight to establish themselves. It is not clear they will win. There are some organizing frames around which resistance can coalesce.

Local and state governments are fighting back. The Democrat ‘woke’ globalist elite is still powerful. They are not offering much resistance yet, but that is for a reason.

They may want to let Trumpians get rid of things they would like to remove, themselves, but do not dare. There is a good chance the Trumpers will self destruct. Right wing revolutions almost always start fighting among each other when they get power and this often brings them down.

The core fact about all this is that, ultimately. The Trumpians cannot win. Their ideas are out of place in the modern world. Yet they can create an incredible amount of damage.

Trumpism presents a challenge to countries like Canada, which they must rise to. We must start bringing our own institutions into line with the modern world. We must start aligning ourselves with the successful states of modern times. These are what we must emulate, not throwbacks to the age of mercantilist imperialism.

Let me end this by returning to the tendency of anti Trump Canadians to start fighting the annexation of Canada before it happens. I was amused by a recent article in a prominent ‘left’ publication. Something like that would have been unimaginable a few weeks ago.

A journalist lady wanted to prescribe strategy for fighting a guerrilla war against the American army on Canadian territory. Women often seem to be the most enthusiastic about war fighting, especially suicidal war. She also came from a third world country, and her ideas of resistance war developed from that context.

The problem is that Canada is not a densely populated, rural tropical country. As Mao put it, the guerrilla army moves among the peasants like a fish through the ocean. We do not have an ocean of peasants in Canada.

She also wants Canadian guerrillas to go and hide in the woods. Secret police infiltrators into right wing militias always want them to do that, too. They would starve and get hunted down.

We could take out pipe lines and power lines, or drop bridges. That is easier done from bases in the towns. The urban environment is much easier for modern guerrillas to hide in.

Consult Hamas on this subject. We might build, under our major cities, hundreds of miles of zig zag tunnels with thousands of blast doors. Then, stockpile food, water, fuel, and ammunition. Assemble vast quantities of anti tank weapons.

Of course, the Americans might imitate the Israelis and take out their frustrations on the civilian population. Are Canadians as resilient as Gazans? Or perhaps the word is ‘fatalistic’.

Dear Chrystia Freeland had yet another approach to fighting the Americans. We need to get nuclear weapons. We would have little trouble producing them ourselves.

However, an effective delivery method could be a problem. Chrystia thought we should ally with France and the UK. These may seem like reliable allies to her.

They might provide us with rockets. We would need early warning systems, so they are not taken out before we can launch them. Basing them would be an interesting problem.

I am a smart guy and I have my own delivery plan for our nuclear deterrent against the Trumpians. Smuggle the bombs over the border and set them up in safe houses in large urban areas of The States. Rig them as ‘dead hands’; to go off automatically if we are attacked. For example, they could go off if they do not get a cell phone call once a day with the right code.

Actually, if the Americans invaded, a pacifist approach would be wise. We should let those who are in a better position to do so, do the fighting against a militant America. These would have a well developed technical military, and their home territory secured.

An American occupation would not last long. If they are going to start invading other countries, the resistance to them will be very strong. They would be fighting the entire world.

So, in future postings about Canadian resistance to the Trumpians, I will stick to economic and political aspects. Perhaps there are some cultural aspects. There is much yet for me to write about, on this topic.