Beware anti-anti-Americanism
A rising chorus of condemnation of anti-Americanism in this country threatens to subject us to the same risks Americans now face, with diminishing odds every day
by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>
Anti-anti-Americanism is on a dangerous rise in Canada. Recent evidence: Politically tuned-in hockey fans who booed the US flag worn by American players at a world junior championship hockey game in Vancouver this month were berated and mocked by boorish and bullying mainstream media commentators adopting an unabashed pro-American point of view.
Vancouver Sun columnist Peter McMartin ascended to the front page to insult thinking Canadians: “When the hockey louts start chanting the same slogans as the local Trotskyist cell, you know you have an ugly trend,” he wrote. There is, of course, no Trotskyist cell outside McMartin’s creative imagination, and the chants, had he opened an ear onto the world sometime in the last four years, are only those heard absolutely everywhere on the planet today—and for pretty good reason.
But McMartin is only one of a multitude of such out-of-tune commentators that proliferate suspiciously across this country. George Jonas, in his National Post column syndicated in CanWest newspapers across the country, attacked intelligent and aware Canadian observers of international affairs as “aging vampires of anti-Americanism.” The cause of this over-the-top vitriol? The suggestion, common among most outward-looking and reasonable Canadians, that the American star to which we’ve been economically hitched the last half century, could be falling.
But the origins of this rising tide of anti-anti-Americanism go far deeper than recent hockey games and stock market gyrations. The foundational Canadian tradition of anti-Americanism has long been repeatedly attacked by political leaders from all parties at all levels of government and by elite columnists in all establishment newspapers across the country. It has always been labelled “damaging” to the economy of Canada, as “risky” in terms of political relations with the US, and, most inaccurately and damaging of all, as historically “groundless.”
Yet Canadian anti-Americanism is none of these. On the contrary, pernicious and creeping pro-Americanism exposes our economy to great risks, severely damages Canada’s international relations with the rest of the world, and runs counter to the historical reality of Canada. Anti-Americanism, expressed strongly, consistently, and repeatedly from coast to coast, not only improves Canada’s economic prospects and political relations in the world community, it promises to re-unite the nation with its lost historical foundations—foundations buried out of sight by generations of quasi-US foreign agents posing as Canadian columnists and political leaders bent on denigrating anti-Americanism as though it were a bad thing.
The historical grounds for a Canada defined as “Not America” are found in the lost history of this nation. The Canadian River flows east out of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico at about 300 km northeast of Albuquerque, across the Texas panhandle just north of Amarillo, through Oklahoma running south of Oklahoma City, before its confluence with the Arkansas River, which shortly empties into the Mississippi just south of Little Rock. It is so named because it marked the southern extremity of the nation of Canada as it existed for at least two centuries prior to the British imposition of a foreign-written constitution.
Yes, there was a Canada prior to the foundation of the much-diminished British Dominion of Canada created in its place by that act of foreign conquest (just as, locally, the Columbia region—the expansive and highly productive Columbia River basin—was reduced to British Columbia once the British and Americans were done carving Canada up). The real Canadian nation for over two centuries covered most of North America east of the colonies of Kentucky, Virginia, and scattered British settlements up the eastern seaboard, west and south to Spanish California and Texas, and north to off the top of the known map.
Throughout large parts of this ancient Canada, French Canadians (descendents of those who long before escaped France for the same reason the Americans escaped England) and Indians are presented in Canadian history textbooks as two different and wholly distinct peoples—one being wild traders, the other being savages. These textbooks were written originally by the imperial occupation British forces who successfully ruled a global empire by the same art of artificially dividing people. But French Canadians and Indians were, by the 18th century, pretty much one and the same through centuries of intermarriage across most of North America. During times of peace, they wore suspenders, tilled the soil, ranched livestock, and fished; in times of war, they stripped off their shirts, painted their faces, and abandoned their homes to conduct heroic guerilla warfare from the blindingly thick and maddeningly inhospitable Canadian bush or equally blindingly vast prairie.
And war came often, either with the British, the French (not to be confused with the French Canadians) or the menacingly belligerent religious fundamentalists gathering in greater numbers in the American colonies. Official history suggests that the North American vastness beyond the British American colonies hugging the North American eastern seaboard and the military forts of the French and British up the St Lawrence valley, was empty except for scattered tribes of nomads and canoeing men in beaver hats. In fact, most of the continent was a nation whose existence it has since been convenient for US, British, and French regimes all to completely obliterate from history.
The Americans today are delivering a constitution and new history books to Iraq, with limited success in the face of an effective native insurgency. Britain set the example. Never has any imperial power done as complete and effective a job at erasing a nation’s memory of itself as Britain did, with the connivance of the US and France, in its erasing of the ancient nation of Canada. Though the search today for a mysteriously absent Canadian national identity comprises the foundation of so much of this nation’s literature, art, and filmmaking, so thorough was the imperial re-constitution of Canada, that most of those producing such work are unaware that a national identity already exists, buried and hidden with this lost Canadian history.
But pieces of that history remain visible. The so-called “Indian Wars,” as recorded in US historical literature, were in reality a one-hundred-year campaign of ethnic cleansing of Canada by crusading religious zealots pouring west out of Old Testament-embracing fanatical American jihadist camps, mostly in Kentucky and Virginia. This murderous and proselytizing crusade was financed by American political and business expansionists who saw in the brutal activities of their crazed terrorists an opportunity to acquire Canadian national territory and resources. Canadians inhabiting a peaceful, continent-wide, decentralized, and free-trading nation called Canada were hunted down and murdered— men, women and children all—in a bloody slaughter so mad and complete, the existence of the nation and her people is no longer widely known today. The American campaign of genocide of Canadians, unmatched in human history then or since, was so efficient, all that remained of Canadians were those families of refugees able to flee north just ahead of the crazed gangs of American murderers, to the mostly barren and freezing wasteland at the top of the continent. The border between the Canada of today and what later became the United States marks the ceasefire line in the undeclared and still non-armisticed US territorial war of aggression on Canada —complete with paramilitary terrorist death squads.
The 49th degree of latitude was established by the British once Britain was freed from her own mad wars in Europe and turned her imperial attentions outward again to the nation of Canada and her rich resources—those that acquisitive capitalists back in New York and Boston, no less than those in London, eyed covetously.
The price for Canadians in accepting offers of British foreign protection of what remained of Canada, before a final act of complete genocide threatened by rampaging American jihadists, was outright possession as a colony by the only slightly less odious British empire—a bargain the exhausted, defeated, and broken families of Canada could not afford to refuse. The independent and sovereign nation of Canada ceased to exist the day the British military occupation forced on Canadians the foreign-written constitutional document delivered straight from the financial district of London and called The British North America Act of 1867. The nation remains, to this day, a possession of Britain, and comes complete with our own British viceroy presently in the person of Michaëlle Jean, the British government-approved Governor General of Canada, the highest office in this occupied and still non-sovereign land.
Canada is therefore defined as that part of the original nation saved from savage murder by US terrorists and ethnic cleansing by the US Army. Of course we can’t turn back the clock and take back what was once ours. But surely, when that same nation runs roughshod over negotiated trade deals, ignores environmental measures aimed at saving our common air and water, and bullies the whole world (again) with real and threatened use of its highly efficient killing machines, we are, are we not, allowed to at least boo when they come into what remains of our territory to yet again wave their war flag and sing their violent anthem?
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