I tremble for my country whenever I see the bland, pasty face of our new Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, on television. It’s not that Harper is dumb. He is actually quite clever, and stands out dramatically in a party that is notoriously filled with ignoramuses and barely literate yahoos. It’s not that Harper is incompetent. He has shown remarkable political acumen, and he ran his election campaign brilliantly. It’s not that he is dishonest, or corrupt. I’ve seen no evidence of either. The problem is not that he is “socially conservative” or promoting a religious agenda. He shows no evidence of being any more socially conservative in his personal views than the average Canadian. Besides, there is not much market for the social conservative agenda in Canada, where people remain, on the whole, individualistic and fond of personal liberty. Canadians find religious zealotry distasteful.
The real problem is that he isn’t Canadian. He’s not loyal to the country he has been elected to govern. He sees himself as a colonial agent for Washington. Whatever policies he seeks to get in motion, they will have one, and only one ultimate purpose: to please his boss, George W. Bush. It took only a few seconds after his swearing in for him to start to display the most shameless ass-kissing in that regard. Most issues that concern Canadians have been rapidly shoved onto the back-burner, to be replaced by a completely out-of-proportion preoccupation with getting Canada more involved in Afghanistan, more directly involved with Bush’s phony-baloney “war on terror”, and getting the Canadian military more under the direction of American commanders.
As a consequence, Canadians are starting to be rather suspicious of our role in Afghanistan. Up until this point, most Canadians have been quite supportive of our presence there. When the new “democratic” regime, which we were supposed to be fighting to protect, suddenly condemned an Afghan citizen to death for converting to Christianity, there was a flash of suspicion, but it was not sufficient to change that opinion. Nor have casualties been an issue, despite the fact the our most serious casualties where inflicted by American “friendly fire.” Canadians, as far as I can tell, have never laboured under the bizarre delusion that you can fight a war without some of your soldiers getting killed. Canadian soldiers are expected to know what they are signing up for. There has never been any need for idiotic government mummery to cover up the realities of war, and never any question that merely having casualties would weaken support for a military action.
That’s why I was profoundly insulted when Harper made attempts to discourage television coverage of Canadian casualties. It was an implication that Canadians were fighting a U.S.-style fantasy war. In such fantasy wars, a government churns out lies to preserve the delusion that they can be fought painlessly and effortlessly and without cost. Canadians have never needed, or wanted such delusions. But Harper assumes that we can be conned and manipulated and panicked as readily as our cousins south of the line. I think he will have a startling come-uppance.
Harper’s preoccupation with Afghanistan, and the particular phrases he uses to discuss it, reveal what kind of critter he is. Since the moment he was elected, he has done virtually nothing but squawk parrot-talk from his master’s vocabulary. “We won’t cut and run” and “our troops in harms way”! These cliché phrases were never in the Canadian public vocabulary. They come out of Harper’s mouth so easily because his mind doesn’t live in this country. For all his blustering and posing as a champion of the Canadian military, it is perfectly obvious that his only aim is to reduce the Canadian armed forces to being a squad of latrine cleaners for the U.S. military.
At the moment, the U.S. forces are “commanded” by a disgusting, spineless, simpering little coward who struts around on aircraft carriers pretending to be some kind of warrior. In reality, he would piss his pants, if confronted with any real danger to his pathetic little quivering bum. He would sell out his country in a second. The idea of Canadian armed forces being even indirectly under the command of a creature like GeorgieWorgie Bush, frankly, makes me sick to my stomach.
For generations, Canadians struggled to get rid of a political upper crust that had its primary loyalty to London, not to Canada. It took two world wars and an incredibly high rate of casualties, to wean ourselves of those bozos.
Now we are gradually, and deftly being suckered into colonial status by another bunch of clowns who think the same way, except it’s the White House they bow to, now, instead of Whitehall. Will Harper and his crowd succeed? Probably not. Every time he opens his mouth, he advertises, with every parroted phrase, that he is not one of us. It won’t take long for Canadians to figure it out.
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