Those Canadians who imagine that Canada’s role in global politics is both important and successful need to have some of their balloons punctured.
Our politicians are constantly repeating to us how much the world admires us for our “peace keeping tradition”, and how important our international commitments are. The truth is that almost nobody outside of Canada has heard about them, and even fewer care. I once checked out a published history of U.N. peacekeeping. It contained no reference to the activities of any Canadian forces at all. Outside of Canada, I have never encountered any press or personal discussion by anyone about Canada’s supposedly famous peace-keeping activities, or of any Canadian military actions or commitments. Even in countries where we are, in fact, doing peacekeeping work, only the blue U.N. uniforms are recognized by the local belligerents, and they don’t care whether we are Canadians or Martians. Far from caring about what Canada does on the global military scene, few people outside of Canada know that we have an army at all. If we are fighting anywhere near Americans, it is taken for granted that we are Americans, or that, if we are not, the distinction is of no importance. I hate to break it to misty-eyed fans of our glorious military, but this is especially true in Afghanistan, where we are engaged in our largest military project since the Korean War.
Even where we are fighting, and have direct “control” over an entire province, we remain invisible, as a nation, to our enemies. Out of 42 Taliban prisoners recently captured by our forces, an enterprising (and refreshingly cynical) Toronto Globe and Mail reporter discovered that none whatsoever knew what or where Canada was.. They could not even identify the name as referring to a country. One of our captive oponents guessed that Canada “might be an old and destroyed city” , somewhere.[1]
Compare this reality with the pronouncements of Rick Hillier, Canada’s former Chief of the Defense Staff, commander in the field, and zealot for our presence in Afghanistan. He claimed that a suicide bombing that killed more than 100 people in Kandahar province was a response to debates in Canada’s House of Commons about the future of our mission. It doesn’t shock me that our politicians and generals would peddle such nonsense … they have long established their propensity to bullshit and manipulate the Canadian public. What does shock me is the willingness of professional journalists and political analysts to let such idiotic pronouncements go unquestioned.
Canadian journalists have also proven shockingly eager to swallow the bullshit about “engagement” with Beijing, the world’s most brutal violator of human rights, which callously executes political dissidents to harvest their organs, and sells them at a tidy profit. We’ve been “engaging” the Communist Party in Beijing ever since the slaughter at Tienanmen Square, and two decades of this “engagement” has produced exactly zero improvements in the Party’s respect for human rights. As the Communist Party’s program of genocide accelerates in Tibet, Canadian politicians flock to banquet and clink champagne glasses with Party officials, always careful to “engage” them about human rights issues (“So, what about them there hooman rites?” — “Don’t worry. Be Happy.” — “Oh, okay.”). The Communist gangsters giggle and sneer at them, and refer to Canadians by the Mandarin slang term for “suckers”. In the eyes of the small-town hicks who populate Canadian public affairs, all that matters is the construction cranes visible in Shanghai, the opulence of the Party’s palaces, and the impressive, inflated figures in the Party’s made up statistics. Our politicians and business leaders bear a striking resemblance to the illiterate, bearded barbarians who were paraded through the cathedrals of Constantinople and, after being stuffed with wine and sausages, returned to the forests to tell their tribes tales of the infinite wealth and power of the Emperor’s realm.
And it’s not exactly the first time. Remember Indonesia? It was the previous Asian Giant, the poster-boy empire of development without democracy, beloved of all freedom-hating politicians. In January, 1996, our Prime Minister accompanied eight Canadian provincial Premiers, and hundreds of tyrannophile Canadian businessmen to Jakarta to be feasted in the Jakarta Hilton. They signed 2.7 billion dollars worth of deals. Suharto’s dictatorship was notorious for brutal repression, wholesale massacres, and profligate corruption. It was conducting a racist campaign of genocide in territories it had violently conquered. In this, it exactly paralleled the Communist Party’s activities in Tibet. But our Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, dismissed such concerns with the assertion that human rights had to improve in Indonesia because we were giving the dictator lots of money. “Isolation is the worst recipe, in my judgment, for curing human rights problems.” he lectured Canadian reporters. “It is participation. It is being there to raise the issue, to help them cope with their problems ― that is the best way. .… As this country is opening up, the situation has improved. I hope the pressure all of us are putting on them is helping.” [2] Exactly what this “pressure” was, he did not specify. The hernias caused by the strain of carrying away so much free Canadian cash, perhaps. At the time, all the world’s press was describing Indonesia in exactly the same ecstatic terms as they now describe China, and peddling exactly the same nonsense about improving human rights conditions through “engagement.”
Six months later, Canada’s foreign minister, Lloyd Axeworthy, was being hustled out of the country so that he, and other foreign dignitaries, would not see the regime’s riot police and thugs clubbing and shooting the population. Within another year, Indonesia’s “economic miracle” had vanished, as all the fictive “enterprise”, which was nothing but State-managed swindles and ponzie schemes to begin with, evaporated. Most of the country’s wealth vanished into numbered accounts in Switzerland ― and Canada’s investment and aid money went with it. Rioters overturned the regime, and a new one, which shows few signs of being any less corrupt or more democratic, took the reigns. But all the “engagement” ninnies kept their mouths shut, and shifted their attention to Beijing.
Many who are suspicious of military adventures, and dubious of “globalized” trade, maintain the delusion that the old-fashioned kind of Third World Development Aid that was fashionable in the sixties and seventies is our real forte. They wax romantic about how much Canada is loved by the world’s poor for it’s foreign aid successes in the past. This is the sort of fantasy that old NDP activists like to indulge in: Canada as the Great White Father delivering blankets and beans to the starving natives, and receiving feel-good wampum and ceremonial headdress in return. The whole world, we are told, is impressed and grateful for our history of humanitarian aid.
Yet, wherever Canadian aid has been concentrated enough to be noticeable, it has seldom achieved anything very impressive. Take, for example, Tanzania, a country which Canadian politicians enthusiastically adopted as a recipient of large scale development aid. Academics, journalists and politicians alike were easily impressed by the pompous pseudo-intellectual pretensions of its dictator, Julius Nyerere. Canadian aid money, expertise, and personnel poured into the country, on a large scale, at least in relation to Canada’s population and economy. The result was unmitigated disaster. Canadian development projects brutally pushed self-sufficient tribal people off their land, casting them into wretched poverty and destroying their cultures. The dispossessed made way for fields of wheat, for bread that only the country’s urban elite could (or wanted to) eat. State-managed industries were built by the Canadian tax-payer, which never produced anything, but bought equipment from Canadian millionaires at twice the world price, They displaced existing small-scale enterprises, and then closed down. As usual, the hundreds of millions of Canadian investment and aid money vanished into Swiss banks. Nyerere, the sage and superman of Africa, looted his country like all the other scumbags worshiped by intellectuals in North America. Canadian “expertise” turned out to be mostly useless or destructive, Canadian tractors and trucks lie rusting in heaps all over Tanzania, and Canadian aid did nothing but promote injustice and poverty.
Yet we hear the same glowing reports about our wonderful work in Afghanistan, and how beloved we are by the people, and how respected we are in the world for our selfless deeds and clean-cut, Sergeant Preston Of The Mounties image.
Wake up, Canadians. We have no “image”. The world does not think we are cool. The world does not know, or care, if we exist. Only the Dutch know we exist, and admire us for something we did half a century ago, an amazing case of prolonged gratitude in a world where the cultural memory span is notoriously short. But outside of the Dutch, nobody notices our global presence or status. Prime Minister Harper’s “showdown” in Romania, where he “demanded” replacement NATO troops that he had already been told would show up, was briefly noticed in the European press, where it was enjoyed as an amusing joke. It was deemed something on the same level as a child’s recital of a poem at a kindergarten pageant.
Considering the record of our lame and disastrous aid projects, our naive sucker deals in international trade, and our immoral collaboration with tyrants and international gangsters, we should be glad that nobody actually remembers we are here. If they actually did think about us long enough to look at the consequences of our actions, on the global stage, they would not be filled with respect, but with contempt.
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[1] Graeme Smith, “Taliban Foot Soldirs Deeply Ignorant of the World”, Globe and Mail, March 27, 2008.
[2] quoted in John Stackhouse, Out of Poverty and Into Something More Comfortable, Random House Canada, 2000.
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