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https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=1085501&post_id=159191289&utm_source=post-email-title&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=rovhk&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo0NjUxMDE4NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTU5MTkxMjg5LCJpYXQiOjE3NDIxNDQ0OTYsImV4cCI6MTc0NDczNjQ5NiwiaXNzIjoicHViLTEwODU1MDEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.8M1c5F6V8ZY9HUYicCj2lVY7jOi1dPYcdlI--Pvxu38
Blame Canada
Our warmongering, drugged-out conspiracy theory
When Trump announces an aggressive policy, he attaches to it a grotesque justification. The nonsensical fiction is supposed remain in our minds, as a button to be pushed, so that we accept violence. We will have trouble questioning lies later if we accept them when offered, because that would challenge our own sense of ourselves as not being idiots.
This is the magic of the big lie, as Hitler explained in Mein Kampf. Tell a lie so big, advised Hitler, that people will not believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. His biggest lie was that of an international Jewish conspiracy: something that could always be blamed, something that would always relieve you of responsibility. In 1939, he and his propagandists piled up the fictions about Poland. They pretended that Poland did not really exist as a state, but also that Poland was the aggressor and had started the war.
Big lies today? That Canada attacked the United States first by sending masses of fentanyl across the border. And also that Canada also does not really exist.
To be sure, fentanyl is a serious and deadly problem. It is in the third wave of America’s opioid crisis, after OxyContin and heroin. It kills people, including young people, in alarming numbers.
For a quarter century, the opioid crisis has been an essential element of the American experience. In certain parts of the country, including some I know well, one cannot carelessly bring up the subject of opioids with strangers, because of the likelihood of a recent family death.
Opioids, including fentanyl, are a preeminently American problem. We have the highest rate of opioid deaths in the world. We Americans are not only the consumers of fentanyl; we are also the the vast majority of the smugglers. Our “health care” system is in the middle of it the consuming and the smuggling. The opioid crisis began because of a moneymaking scheme by an American company, Purdue Pharma. Our commercial health care guides people towards opioids, but lacks long-term care and attention needed to prevent addiction. The addiction wave that began with Purdue’s OxyContin and continued with heroin has now reached fentanyl.
The demand for fentanyl is American, including inside the Trump White House itself. The people who live at the epicenters of the addiction crisis tend to vote Republican; without them, Trump would never have become president in the first place. Trump and Vance are attuned to the opioid issue, in the sense that they see the suffering as a political resource, as a wellspring of misery that can be directed against an enemy of choice.
Vance’s message? We must understand our own addictions as an attack from outside. It is important to understand the psychology of this. An addict will tend to blame others rather than himself. In our domestic politics, we have elevated this irresponsibility to a national verity: someone besides Americans must be to blame for America’s addictions. This has now become our foreign policy. We are blaming someone else for our problems, and flailing for ever more nonsensical stories: like that Canada is to blame.
In his book, Vance tells of us his mother, a nurse, who used to be an alcoholic and was addicted to pharmaceuticals. He has chosen to make her central to his political messaging. Vance has misled the public about the essentials of his mother’s problem, blaming other countries — ‘'poison coming across our border” — for her travails. His mother’s problems had nothing to do with drugs coming from other countries.
Unlike other politicians, including some Republicans, Vance has not become an advocate of drug prevention or addiction recovery. He has instead become a champion of lying and blaming others — behaviors that he himself associates with addiction.
In his book, he instructs us that we all need to take personal responsibility and not expect the government to help us. We need to reject the “cultural movement” that urges us to blame others for our own failings. As vice-president, however, he leads that “cultural movement.” He blames other countries for what we do, and then joins in as we direct our government’s power against them.
As the extreme case of addiction reminds us, lies work because they shift responsibility. For Vance to blame other countries for his mother’s problems is a lie without foundation but with psychological appeal. For Americans to blame other countries generally for fentanyl is also an attractive displacement of responsibility.
To be sure, other countries are involved. China manufactures the basics. Two drug cartels in Mexico play a huge rule. The drug is indeed smuggled in large quantities (though usually by Americans and almost entirely for Americans) from Mexico to the United States. Although it is unreasonable to create a false distinction between guilty Mexicans and innocent Americans, it is very important to stop the supply — as the Biden administration was already doing, with some success.
The Trump administration claims that Canada deserves tariffs because of fentanyl smuggling. Vance claims that Canada is “taking advantage” of him personally by allowing drugs to cross the border. This quite extraordinary capacity for personal grievance introduces a dangerous political fantasy.
Blaming Canada is bad faith. When Trump groups Canada and Mexico together and claims that fentanyl is “pouring in” through both countries he is not telling the truth. The amount of fentanyl that passes from Canada to the United States is about 0.2% of the total -- not two percent, zero point two percent. The total amount smuggled in fiscal year 2024 would fit in one suitcase. Canada was not even mentioned in the official 2024 National Drug Threat Assesment of the Drug Enforcement Administration. As the Canadians are often too polite to point out, the real problem at the border is the illegal smuggling of American guns into Canada.
Canada has been a reliable friend and ally to the United States. Casting Canada as the villain in an American story is weird. Portraying Canada as America’s fentanyl enemy is a conspiracy theory, with no basis in empirical reality, but with firm traction in the need to blame someone else for what we ourselves have done. It is fiction on a very grand scale, on that requires an entire alternative reality to be constructed around it. Once we accept that “Canadian fentanyl” is a conspiracy theory, then America’s trade war with Canada takes on a very different resonance.
Trump and his cabinet are training the press to associate the one thing with the other: that the tariffs have to do with the fentanyl. But this is bunk. The idea that Canada sends us fentanyl and that we respond with tariffs involves such a dripping overflow of mendacity that it demands that we seek elsewhere for the truth, and urgently.
It is much more plausible to think, as former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, that tariffs are a step in a policy designed to soften up Canada for annexation. This follows from what Trump himself has said, on a number of occasions in public, and also to Trudeau in private. Trump himself is ever more persistent and direct in his claim that Canada should become the fifty-first state. Once we see that the tariffs have nothing to do with fentanyl, we can ask: why, then, all the rhetoric?
The tariff policy and the fentanyl fantasy both come from another place: the desire to annex Canada.
The fentanyl propaganda is most likely designed to prepare Americans to see Canada as an enemy. The only way for the United States to achieve such a territorial aggrandizement would be threats intending to make Canadians surrender, or an actual invasion of Canada. In such a pursuit, associating Canada with our addiction crisis is useful propaganda.
Why not blame the Canadians for what we do to ourselves? And then punish them for it? And when they do not solve an essentially American problem, as of course they cannot, then let Canadians be targeted for further lies and hatred.
The “Blame Canada” song from South Park was always a satire of America, but at least a comforting one, as it showed American self-awareness. Its last two lines: “We must blame them and cause a fuss/Before somebody thinks of blaming us!” This is now happening, as reality, and it has to be faced.
Squarely faced. Democrats in the United States sometimes take comfort from the notion that a United States with Canada added would be more likely to elect Democratic than Republican presidents. This is daft.
We should not imagine a hypothetical America that somehow just peacefully involves Canadians in our elections. We have to consider the process by which the subjugation of Canada would take place. In a world where the United States uses violence or the threat of violence to annex Canada, the colonized Canadians are not going to have the right the vote. Their country would be treated as a hostile military zone, to be exploited for its resources. And in a world of imperialism within North America, Americans too will see their rights dismissed. When an empire arises, a republic falls.
And, by the way: it is not at all clear that the United States would win such a war. Americans tend to blot out our disastrous history of invading Canada. And again, it is important not to confuse politeness with weakness. I once visited a Canadian resort town where everything aboveground was perky commerce and skiing fun. And then underground was a place where you went to throw axes. Next to me was a dad with two girls, maybe twelve and eight, who were hitting the bull’s eye. (This was an all-ages axe-throwing facility.) The axe quivering in the wood is a suggestive reality.
War with Canada is what Trump seems to have in mind. Fentanyl is not the only the big lie. That Canada does not really exist is the other. The way that this fiction is formulated is strangely Putinist. Trump's rhetoric about Canada uncannily echoes that of Russian propagandists towards Ukraine. The claim that the country is not real; that its people really want to join us; that the border is an artificial line; that history must lead to annexation... This is all familiar from Putin, as is Trump’s curious ambiguity about a neighbor: they are our brothers, they are also our enemies; they are doing terrible things to us, they also don’t really exist.
The imperialist rhetoric has to be seen for what it is, which is preparation not just for trade war but for war itself. And, it goes without saying, a disastrous one, in every sense, for everyone. (Except Putin and Xi, perhaps: the American-Canadian conflict is one way that Trump is handing them the world on a platter.)
Just because someone treats you politely and speaks your language does not mean that they want to be invaded by you. This was an underlying Russian mistake about Ukrainians. Ukrainian public culture, before the Russian invasion, was bilingual and polite. In general people simply adjusted to whichever language was most comfortable for the other person. Visiting Russians therefore had the experience of Ukrainians speaking their language, and then could arrogantly assume that this was because Ukrainians were in fact Russians and wanted to be part of Russia. I fear that Americans, or at least some Americans in the White House, are making a similar mistake.
Canada also has a polite public culture, less bilingual in practice than Ukraine’s, but unlike Ukraine’s with an official second language. Canadians, whether their first language is French or English, will naturally speak English with monolingual Americans. This is simple courtesy, but it leads Americans away from considering Canada’s differences, one of which is that the official language of its largest province is French and that the entire country has two official languages. Canadian elected officials use both, at least at the beginning of their speeches. They have to debate each other in both. The Canadian foreign minister is from Quebec. When she is talking circles around us, we don’t necessarily pause to consider that she is doing so in her second language.
Canadians tend to be (or tended to be) patient with us. Canadians know Americans well, and tend (or have tended) to see us as our best selves. All of this is to their credit; none of this means that they want to become the fifty-first state (a phrase so dumb it hurts my fingertips to type it). Canada is a very interesting and a very different country, with a very different history. Canadians have quite different institutions, and live quite different (and longer) lives. Canadians have a profound sense of who they are; anyone who suggests the contrary simply has not taken the time to come to the country or to listen with any attention.
The notion that Canada is not real is an example of the complaisant lies that imperialists tell themselves before beginning doomed wars of aggression. The specific association of Canada with fentanyl is a big lie that allows Americans to shift responsibility away to a chosen enemy and enter a world of geopolitical fantasy. Anyone who plays with the idea that Canada is not a real place or repeats the fentanyl slander is warmongering and preparing the way for North American catastrophe.
Big lies are powerful; but they are also vulnerable, at least before war begins. Wars begin with words, and we have to take words seriously, at the time when they matter most, which is now. When we see the truth of where this is all meant to go, we can prevent it: by calling out the big liars and telling the small truths.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
When Trump announces an aggressive policy, he attaches to it a grotesque justification. The nonsensical fiction is supposed remain in our minds, as a button to be pushed, so that we accept violence. We will have trouble questioning lies later if we accept them when offered, because that would challenge our own sense of ourselves as not being idiots.
This is the magic of the big lie, as Hitler explained in Mein Kampf. Tell a lie so big, advised Hitler, that people will not believe that you would deceive them on such a scale. His biggest lie was that of an international Jewish conspiracy: something that could always be blamed, something that would always relieve you of responsibility. In 1939, he and his propagandists piled up the fictions about Poland. They pretended that Poland did not really exist as a state, but also that Poland was the aggressor and had started the war.
Big lies today? That Canada attacked the United States first by sending masses of fentanyl across the border. And also that Canada also does not really exist.
To be sure, fentanyl is a serious and deadly problem. It is in the third wave of America’s opioid crisis, after OxyContin and heroin. It kills people, including young people, in alarming numbers.
For a quarter century, the opioid crisis has been an essential element of the American experience. In certain parts of the country, including some I know well, one cannot carelessly bring up the subject of opioids with strangers, because of the likelihood of a recent family death.
Opioids, including fentanyl, are a preeminently American problem. We have the highest rate of opioid deaths in the world. We Americans are not only the consumers of fentanyl; we are also the the vast majority of the smugglers. Our “health care” system is in the middle of it the consuming and the smuggling. The opioid crisis began because of a moneymaking scheme by an American company, Purdue Pharma. Our commercial health care guides people towards opioids, but lacks long-term care and attention needed to prevent addiction. The addiction wave that began with Purdue’s OxyContin and continued with heroin has now reached fentanyl.
The demand for fentanyl is American, including inside the Trump White House itself. The people who live at the epicenters of the addiction crisis tend to vote Republican; without them, Trump would never have become president in the first place. Trump and Vance are attuned to the opioid issue, in the sense that they see the suffering as a political resource, as a wellspring of misery that can be directed against an enemy of choice.
Vance’s message? We must understand our own addictions as an attack from outside. It is important to understand the psychology of this. An addict will tend to blame others rather than himself. In our domestic politics, we have elevated this irresponsibility to a national verity: someone besides Americans must be to blame for America’s addictions. This has now become our foreign policy. We are blaming someone else for our problems, and flailing for ever more nonsensical stories: like that Canada is to blame.
In his book, Vance tells of us his mother, a nurse, who used to be an alcoholic and was addicted to pharmaceuticals. He has chosen to make her central to his political messaging. Vance has misled the public about the essentials of his mother’s problem, blaming other countries — ‘'poison coming across our border” — for her travails. His mother’s problems had nothing to do with drugs coming from other countries.
Unlike other politicians, including some Republicans, Vance has not become an advocate of drug prevention or addiction recovery. He has instead become a champion of lying and blaming others — behaviors that he himself associates with addiction.
In his book, he instructs us that we all need to take personal responsibility and not expect the government to help us. We need to reject the “cultural movement” that urges us to blame others for our own failings. As vice-president, however, he leads that “cultural movement.” He blames other countries for what we do, and then joins in as we direct our government’s power against them.
As the extreme case of addiction reminds us, lies work because they shift responsibility. For Vance to blame other countries for his mother’s problems is a lie without foundation but with psychological appeal. For Americans to blame other countries generally for fentanyl is also an attractive displacement of responsibility.
To be sure, other countries are involved. China manufactures the basics. Two drug cartels in Mexico play a huge rule. The drug is indeed smuggled in large quantities (though usually by Americans and almost entirely for Americans) from Mexico to the United States. Although it is unreasonable to create a false distinction between guilty Mexicans and innocent Americans, it is very important to stop the supply — as the Biden administration was already doing, with some success.
The Trump administration claims that Canada deserves tariffs because of fentanyl smuggling. Vance claims that Canada is “taking advantage” of him personally by allowing drugs to cross the border. This quite extraordinary capacity for personal grievance introduces a dangerous political fantasy.
Blaming Canada is bad faith. When Trump groups Canada and Mexico together and claims that fentanyl is “pouring in” through both countries he is not telling the truth. The amount of fentanyl that passes from Canada to the United States is about 0.2% of the total -- not two percent, zero point two percent. The total amount smuggled in fiscal year 2024 would fit in one suitcase. Canada was not even mentioned in the official 2024 National Drug Threat Assesment of the Drug Enforcement Administration. As the Canadians are often too polite to point out, the real problem at the border is the illegal smuggling of American guns into Canada.
Canada has been a reliable friend and ally to the United States. Casting Canada as the villain in an American story is weird. Portraying Canada as America’s fentanyl enemy is a conspiracy theory, with no basis in empirical reality, but with firm traction in the need to blame someone else for what we ourselves have done. It is fiction on a very grand scale, on that requires an entire alternative reality to be constructed around it. Once we accept that “Canadian fentanyl” is a conspiracy theory, then America’s trade war with Canada takes on a very different resonance.
|
Trump and his cabinet are training the press to associate the one thing with the other: that the tariffs have to do with the fentanyl. But this is bunk. The idea that Canada sends us fentanyl and that we respond with tariffs involves such a dripping overflow of mendacity that it demands that we seek elsewhere for the truth, and urgently.
It is much more plausible to think, as former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, that tariffs are a step in a policy designed to soften up Canada for annexation. This follows from what Trump himself has said, on a number of occasions in public, and also to Trudeau in private. Trump himself is ever more persistent and direct in his claim that Canada should become the fifty-first state. Once we see that the tariffs have nothing to do with fentanyl, we can ask: why, then, all the rhetoric?
The tariff policy and the fentanyl fantasy both come from another place: the desire to annex Canada.
The fentanyl propaganda is most likely designed to prepare Americans to see Canada as an enemy. The only way for the United States to achieve such a territorial aggrandizement would be threats intending to make Canadians surrender, or an actual invasion of Canada. In such a pursuit, associating Canada with our addiction crisis is useful propaganda.
Why not blame the Canadians for what we do to ourselves? And then punish them for it? And when they do not solve an essentially American problem, as of course they cannot, then let Canadians be targeted for further lies and hatred.
The “Blame Canada” song from South Park was always a satire of America, but at least a comforting one, as it showed American self-awareness. Its last two lines: “We must blame them and cause a fuss/Before somebody thinks of blaming us!” This is now happening, as reality, and it has to be faced.
Squarely faced. Democrats in the United States sometimes take comfort from the notion that a United States with Canada added would be more likely to elect Democratic than Republican presidents. This is daft.
We should not imagine a hypothetical America that somehow just peacefully involves Canadians in our elections. We have to consider the process by which the subjugation of Canada would take place. In a world where the United States uses violence or the threat of violence to annex Canada, the colonized Canadians are not going to have the right the vote. Their country would be treated as a hostile military zone, to be exploited for its resources. And in a world of imperialism within North America, Americans too will see their rights dismissed. When an empire arises, a republic falls.
And, by the way: it is not at all clear that the United States would win such a war. Americans tend to blot out our disastrous history of invading Canada. And again, it is important not to confuse politeness with weakness. I once visited a Canadian resort town where everything aboveground was perky commerce and skiing fun. And then underground was a place where you went to throw axes. Next to me was a dad with two girls, maybe twelve and eight, who were hitting the bull’s eye. (This was an all-ages axe-throwing facility.) The axe quivering in the wood is a suggestive reality.
War with Canada is what Trump seems to have in mind. Fentanyl is not the only the big lie. That Canada does not really exist is the other. The way that this fiction is formulated is strangely Putinist. Trump's rhetoric about Canada uncannily echoes that of Russian propagandists towards Ukraine. The claim that the country is not real; that its people really want to join us; that the border is an artificial line; that history must lead to annexation... This is all familiar from Putin, as is Trump’s curious ambiguity about a neighbor: they are our brothers, they are also our enemies; they are doing terrible things to us, they also don’t really exist.
The imperialist rhetoric has to be seen for what it is, which is preparation not just for trade war but for war itself. And, it goes without saying, a disastrous one, in every sense, for everyone. (Except Putin and Xi, perhaps: the American-Canadian conflict is one way that Trump is handing them the world on a platter.)
Just because someone treats you politely and speaks your language does not mean that they want to be invaded by you. This was an underlying Russian mistake about Ukrainians. Ukrainian public culture, before the Russian invasion, was bilingual and polite. In general people simply adjusted to whichever language was most comfortable for the other person. Visiting Russians therefore had the experience of Ukrainians speaking their language, and then could arrogantly assume that this was because Ukrainians were in fact Russians and wanted to be part of Russia. I fear that Americans, or at least some Americans in the White House, are making a similar mistake.
Canada also has a polite public culture, less bilingual in practice than Ukraine’s, but unlike Ukraine’s with an official second language. Canadians, whether their first language is French or English, will naturally speak English with monolingual Americans. This is simple courtesy, but it leads Americans away from considering Canada’s differences, one of which is that the official language of its largest province is French and that the entire country has two official languages. Canadian elected officials use both, at least at the beginning of their speeches. They have to debate each other in both. The Canadian foreign minister is from Quebec. When she is talking circles around us, we don’t necessarily pause to consider that she is doing so in her second language.
Canadians tend to be (or tended to be) patient with us. Canadians know Americans well, and tend (or have tended) to see us as our best selves. All of this is to their credit; none of this means that they want to become the fifty-first state (a phrase so dumb it hurts my fingertips to type it). Canada is a very interesting and a very different country, with a very different history. Canadians have quite different institutions, and live quite different (and longer) lives. Canadians have a profound sense of who they are; anyone who suggests the contrary simply has not taken the time to come to the country or to listen with any attention.
The notion that Canada is not real is an example of the complaisant lies that imperialists tell themselves before beginning doomed wars of aggression. The specific association of Canada with fentanyl is a big lie that allows Americans to shift responsibility away to a chosen enemy and enter a world of geopolitical fantasy. Anyone who plays with the idea that Canada is not a real place or repeats the fentanyl slander is warmongering and preparing the way for North American catastrophe.
Big lies are powerful; but they are also vulnerable, at least before war begins. Wars begin with words, and we have to take words seriously, at the time when they matter most, which is now. When we see the truth of where this is all meant to go, we can prevent it: by calling out the big liars and telling the small truths.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Trump’s Wants a Canadian Anschluss
& Full Dominance in the Western Hemisphere
|
 |
Trump’s photo depicts Switzerland’s famed Matterhorn mountain, actually
At one level, the deranged fascist leader Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada –- replete with massive tariffs already enacted and more threatened -- seems insane. It means significant price increases on both sides of the US-Canadian border. It feeds uncertainty in markets. It promises supply chain nightmares for US and Canadian manufacturers. It is deeply alienating to Canadians, creating a strange new enmity between two giant North American countries and NATO partners with a contiguous 5,525-mile border and a long history of friendly, even intimate relations.
What the Hell is it all about? It’s very simple: Mein Trumpf wants to take Canada over. Literally. He wants a 21st Century North American version of the Anschluss – his role model Adolph Hitler’s annexation of the Federal State of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938.
 |
Going back to the first Trump administration, I’ve long had it in the back of my mind that Trump would try to annex and perhaps even invade Canada. Why not? Fascists atop powerful states are all about territorial expansion and “Lebensraum" --- “breathing space” --- and Trump’s bellicose “Make America Great Again” nationalism has always plugged richly into the notion of US-America’s supposed Manifest Destiny to expand its North American borders (the fascist ogre has been citing Manifest Destiny a lot lately). That Canada is rich in raw materials and land but poor in military power and comparative economic strength only makes the target juicier for Trump.
What do the tariffs have to do with it? It’s not complicated. The point here is to do to Canada what Richard Nixon’s nefarious National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger told the CIA to do to the socialist Allende government in Chile in the early 1970s: “make the economy scream.”
That’s something the United State can do. Canada is largely dependent on cross-border trade with the US. Throwing the tariff switch could crash the Canadian economy. At which point, Trump offers them a solution: “become our 51st state and the tariffs go away” – something he hopes Canadian fascists will embrace like the Austrian Nazis who welcomed Hitler’s takeover.
It’s like Canada’s recently outgoing prime minister Justin Trudeau said last week, “he wants… to see a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that’ll make it easier to annex us.”
More accurately, Trump is threatening to spark such a collapse to make the case for annexation.
It’s really that simple. That’s the plan.
And you don’t have to go searching for secret and classified documents destined for a bathroom n Mar-a-Lago to understand this.
Trump has been saying it out loud. Last December, the US President-Elect Trump went to Toronto and responded to Trudeau’s concerns about the negative impact of Trump’s threatened tariffs by suggesting that Canada could avoid the pain by becoming the United States’ “51st state.”
The following month, Trump publicly threatened the use of “economic force” to bring about a Canadian Anschluss and started referring to Trudeau as “Governor” rather than “Prime Minister.”
Two weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, the New York Times reported, Trump told Trudeau in a private call “that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he want[ed] to revise the [US-Canadia] boundary” and revisit the two nation’s treaties regarding the sharing of lakes and rivers.
Last month, the orange-sprayed madman told Fatherland (FOX) News that his scheme to annex Canada was “a real thing.” He informed reporters that “Canada is not viable as a country” without U.S. trade.
Last week Trump wrote this on his Orwellian TruthSocial account:
“The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State. This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear. Canadians’ taxes will be very substantially reduced, they will be more secure, militarily and otherwise, than ever before, there would no longer be a Northern Border problem, and the greatest and most powerful nation in the World will be bigger, better and stronger than ever — And Canada will be a big part of that. The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World — And your brilliant anthem, ‘O Canada,’ will continue to play, but now representing a GREAT and POWERFUL STATE within the greatest Nation that the World has ever seen!”
And then there’s this from Trump’s parasitic oligarch of a Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick (a multi-billionaire and former CEO of the Wall Street ”financial services” firm Cantor Fitzgerald): “Canada is gonna have to work with us to really integrate their economy, and as the president said, they should consider the amazing advantages of being the 51st state.”
Come on, Canda, become “cherished,” “great,” “powerful,” and “amazing” under the wing of Herr Donald!
Canadian officials wrote off Trump’s initial “51st state” comments as “a joke.” They weren’t a joke.
Don’t take it from liberals, progressives, or a radical leftist like me. Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a “center-right” Washington DC think-tank, recently told Al Jazeera that “when Trump talks about wanting to ‘Make America Great Again’, one component of what he has in mind by greatness is a country that’s expansive, that reaches for and claims new territory, that enlarges itself.”
The Republican political strategist Amy Koch, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s attempted intimidation of Canada “should be seen as part of a wider push for dominance in the Western hemisphere. Tariffs on Canadian and Mexican goods, calls to retake control of the Panama Canal and acquire Greenland, and an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America’ are all elements of that effort. ‘It is [about] fully establishing dominance in the Western Hemisphere, and I think Canada is a part of that.”
Of course, wanting something is not the same as getting it. The annexation of Canada is quite a stretch (both literally and figuratively) given widespread Canadian opposition – including militant opposition from Ontario’s Trumpy premier Doug Ford and both of Canada’s two major parties. Trump’s most likely first target for Western hemispheric expansion and annexation is the Panama Canal Zone. (Trump has recently ordered his generals to draft a plan for the military invasion of Panama). His designs on Greenland may well be a higher priority than Canada.
All that said, Trump’s desire to enclose and accumulate Canada are for real and even if he does not attain annexation he will likely use the tariff weapon to extract significant economic, military, and/or territorial concessions of some kind.
Trump and his party are flat out fascist. They believe that their “great” white supremacist nation deserves to clearly dominate the continent and hemisphere it inhabits. (It’s a bit surprising to me that Trump hasn’t said anything yet about invading Cuba.)
At some point in the not-so-distant future, perhaps, the argument for US takeover of Canada may include the need for northward emigration in imagined flight from the exterminist and fossil capitalist climate catastrophe that Trump – “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (as Noam Chomsky rightly described him in early 2020) – is now acting to accelerate beyond final tipping points.
