A Proposed American Empire

 

Trump openly wants Greenland. He says he wants Canada. 

Canada and Greenland would make the US the world’s largest country, rich in resources it can easily defend. To be honest, it makes sense, and would probably be best for all concerned. I can’t imagine why I would resist being annexed to the US.

Who else should be allowed in? What might an American Empire look like?

They should also annex Cuba. Cuba is not culturally similar. But it would be a mercy. And Cuba is a good forward base in the Caribbean. 

They should annex Guyana—rich in resources, culturally compatible, and a footprint in South America.

Other Caribbean islands do not seem worth the trouble—they would be welfare cases. Except perhaps for the Bahamas.

America should annex Singapore—culturally compatible, and a vital choke point and military base between the Middle East and Far East.

They should annex Australia and New Zealand, for their resources and simply because they are essentially the same ethnicity. Just as China lays claim to Taiwan, it makes no sense for the Anglosphere to be split into separate countries any longer, given our vastly advanced communications and transportation.

On the same principle, the US should form a union with Britain and Ireland. Together again at last. This gives them their forward base for Europe. I think Ireland would be game to come in so long as the US was the dominant partner, and not the UK. This would at the same time solve the problem of Irish reunification and the Northern Irish border. Win-win-win.

They should also annex Malta—they wanted to join the UK decades ago, and they are a strategic point in the Mediterranean. 

The invitation should be extended to the Philippines. Everyone there speaks English to some extent, they are Christian, and they generally embrace American values. Granted, they would be an economic burden, at least at first, but if America needs more population, the Philippines are an ideal source. And they are a great forward base for dealing with troubles in East Asia.

Serious consideration might be given as well to inviting Denmark—another strategic point, at the entrance to the Baltic Sea. 

I realize, of course, that most Canadians would say I am speaking treason. I say the charge is silly.

The Golden Age of the American Entrepreneur

 

The entrepreneur has always been a culture hero to America. They are an American specialty. In Europe, traditionally, you were born into your role. In America, a bright kid from nowhere, and without education, could always rise to the top as an entrepreneur. 

It was entrepreneurs who brought us the computer revolution; nerdy kids from nowhere working in their garages. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, and the lot. Continuing an entrepreneurial tradition that goes back to Edison, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford. 

This is what has put America on top of the world. But we now seem to have come to a kind of golden age: with Trump, we have an entrepreneur in the White House, I believe for the first time. And he seems to be working miracles. In the economic space, we have Elon Musk, again seeming to be working miracles. This may be when America drops the training wheels and sets an entirely new pace.  Just when some might think the American Empire is over.

Entrepreneurs are often hated, as Trump is hated, because they get rich. But they deserve our undying admiration and gratitude. They did not inherit that money or take it from the government—they earned it by improving life for everyone. And entrepreneurs rarely live large: they keep reinvesting the money in some new project, again improving the human condition. As the late KC Irving said, “I like to see wheels turning.” And nobody else has to pay for it, if they do not want the product—which, if they want it, will be cheaper than before, if it was previously even available. 

An entrepreneur sees a problem, and comes up with a solution. They see a need, and they come up with a way to meet it. We see Trump and Musk doing this systematically. They are creative artists. Andy Warhol, for one, understood this. “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

It is no surprise that both Trump and Musk are highly proficient in other art forms as well: they are both brilliant rhetoricians. As I imagine any good entrepreneur needs to be..

If only we could get such men into political power in Canada. 

Either/Or

 

Teaching a Chinese student the common logical fallacies, we came to this example:

 

He became confused. “Isn’t that ‘scare tactic’? I don’t see it as an option.”

Which tells you something of the difference between Chinese and American culture. He assumed that supporting the president was indeed synonymous with being a patriotic Chinese, and that if you did not support the president, you were in serious trouble.

And now we must note that Justin Trudeau thinks the same way as the Chinese authorities. Those who do not support him are unCanadian and unacceptable. He accuses them of being under foreign influence, Russian, American, or Nazi; and they deserve to have serious trouble visited on them. They bank accounts seized, their licenses cancelled, held in prison without trial. 

The Progress of America's Social Disease

 

What is happening now in the USA tracks closely the dynamics of a dysfunctional family.

1. Someone gives in to temptation and sins. In this case, we are talking about the “sexual revolution.”

2. Rather than repent, they allow this to develop into a settled vice. The legalization of abortion probably marks that social threshold. Instead of realizing the original idea was wrong, once confronted with its consequences, Americans moved on from lust to murder.

3. As guilt feelings grow, the guilty party begins to construct a “narrative” instead of facing the truth; a pleasant fiction, in which they are guilty of nothing. They become insane in the proper sense of the term: their thinking and their claims are no longer in accord with what is real. We see this in postmodernism: there is no truth. We can simply “construct” any truth we want.

4. In the next phase, the pretense that truth is random and arbitrary is replaced with the conviction that truth is the enemy. Rather than having the right to choose one’s own truth, one must deny objective truth. Here is where Trump Derangement Syndrome begins: he was too prone to bluntly say what he thought.

5. Now comes the scapegoating phase: anyone not in step with the general denial of reality will be accused of the sin of which the guilty party feels guilty. Trump’s supposed sin, for example, is that he is a “liar.” Within a family, this becomes the habitual scapegoating of one or more children.

6. Over time, as the situation grows more extreme and the truth risks becoming obvious to all, the insane party will then accuse the scapegoated party of themselves being insane. We are seeing this now with the drive to have Trump removed from power with eleven days to go, by declaring him mentally incompetent. The demand is in itself obviously insane.

Within a dysfunctional family, this is generally where it ends. By general consent, the one member of the dysfunctional family who is not, or is least, insane, will be declared insane, and sent off for psychiatric treatment. So the family can go on as always. The child themselves will accept the diagnosis as necessary for survival. 

But where does it end when it happens to a whole society?

Nazi Germany perhaps gives us our most obvious model.

The Art of War

Sun Tzu

It seems rather little noticed, in the midst of the general apocalypse, but Donald Trump declared a state of national emergency yesterday. Not because of the coronavirus; that was already a declared state of emergency. About a threat to the power grid.

He says foreign adversaries are creating and increasingly exploiting vulnerabilities.

The emergency order bans the importation of equipment from “adversary nations.”

Something is going on, and it does not sound good.

I argued in this space a few days ago that war between the US and China was improbable; both had more to lose than to gain.

But I was thinking of conventional war.

What seems to have happened, and become apparent suddenly, is the emergence of a new Cold War, between the US and China, in which China is seeking dominance by non-military means, but no other holds barred. By indirection.

It is strange that this is coming to a head at the same time as the coronavirus pandemic, if the coronavirus pandemic is not a part of this plan.

It is too much to think the Chinese deliberately let the virus loose In Wuhan; the virus is indiscriminate, and they would not start by killing their own people. But once it was loose, they seem to have behaved suspiciously: shutting down travel out of Wuhan except overseas, by air. There are signs they deliberately spread the virus to north Italy: one guy who was part of a Chinese government front organization was standing on street corners asking for hugs with the sign “I am not a virus.” They withheld and suppressed information to other governments, while buying up all the protective equipment they could on the world market. Now they are shipping out protective equipment, and test kits, that turn out to be defective. Is this incompetence, or design?

It may be, too, that the virus escaped from a government lab. And it may be that the lab was working on weaponizing viruses.

Meantime, things seem to be heating up in the South China Sea. This seems to have been initiated by China, sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat, then driving off a US Navy ship. They are trying, as they were inevitably going to sooner or later, to assert sovereignty over those sea lanes. Perhaps they hope the US will be too distracted by the virus to respond.

The rumours are spreading that, apart from electrical equipment, many things being imported from China have built-in vulnerabilities allowing Chinese spying and, potentially, control: 5G, Zoom for teleconferencing, HuaWei phones, and so forth.

A couple of weeks or so ago, Trump called out the navy to stop drug trafficking, suggesting there was a sudden surge in the middle of the pandemic. We have long been thinking the problem was Mexico, and I was thinking Venezuela. On that basis, the call made little sense: the border with Mexico was closed. And the navy was of no use at that border. But the ultimate source for most of these opioids is China. They must come across that ocean. Has China been deliberately flooding the Americas with these drugs, inspired by what opium did to disrupt and weaken Qing Dynasty society?

It is beginning to look, as well, as though China has been doing a lot of bribery around the world. The belt and road initiative has been buying governments, but that is above board. There is something else going on. The WHO is in their pocket. This does not seem to be adequately accounted for by the official funding: as Trump keeps saying, the US pays ten times the portion of their budget that China does. It looks as though people, government officials and others, are being bought individually. We are recently hearing of American academics having been bought. The absurdly pro-regime coverage recently from the CBC makes me suspect that Canadian journalists are being bought. Other evidence is how media outlets in the US and Canada swiftly fell in line behind the claim that it was racist to call COVID-19 the "Chinese virus." YouTuber JJ McCullough tells of being offered money by the Chinese government to spread their propaganda on his channel.

It belatedly occurs to me that this is exactly the Chinese way. No open conflict. Everything is done through “back doors.” One day you wake up, and someone new is calling the shots.

It’s war, Jim, but not war as we know it.

Stop Me, Before I Kill Again...

In reaction to the allegations by Trump that his campaign headquarters were bugged, Mark Levin and Stefan Molyneux have joined Sarah Hoyt in pressing the panic button. Molyneux warns of likely violence to come, and compares the situation to that before the French Revolution. Levin seemed to be literally trembling with rage as he made his case with news reports. He said this was “orders of magnitude” more serious than Watergate

We do not yet know whether there is any thing substantial behind Trump’s charges. If there is, it would seem that we have a constitutional crisis. Bob Woodward was interviewed, and said there is no good mechanism to deal with this.

I wonder. Democratic government—any stable society—depends on a series of gentleman’s agreements. Bad guys will always break them, but everyone counts on most people not doing so. Everyone must trust that most people in authority will do the decent thing when it comes down to it. That level of trust seems to be gone in the US now. There is already fighting in the streets. We have just seen a particularly nasty incident at Middlebury College in Vermont. We are suddenly seeing masked protesters everywhere--eerily like the Fascists in their day.

You have to wonder. What happens if there is a civil war or revolution in America?

A civil war like the first one would require some states to vote to secede from the union. For that to be possible, I think you have to assume a Democratic majority in both state houses, given that the federal government is solidly Republican. Not many states currently qualify: California, Oregon, Nevada, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, New Mexico.

Note that these do not form one geographical block. There is a clump of three on the West Coast, a clump of four on the East Coast, another clump of three on the East Coast, and two odd states in the interior, far apart. So in the case of civil war, or forming a separate country, it could not be a unified opposition. A separatist movement might hope that the rest of the US would do nothing, but if the rest of the US chose to deny them the right to independence, as happened last time this was tried, it would probably not be a terribly even fight. The interior states, if they separated on their own, would be quickly overrun. They probably would not try. It would be unlikely to get more than one of the three-state clumps to pull out in tandem. Independently, even if they did, they would probably easily be overrun. At best, it would be 40 states against 10 in three separate groups which could be picked off separately. 

Some talk of the rebel states joining Canada. That would not help, militarily. Canada does not have the military strength to defend its own land mass, much less help defend someone else’s. And there is no chance of defense in depth. Unlike Russia, everything strategic is in a narrow band just north of the border. A quick tank thrust into Winnipeg, and Canada is cut in two. It would be suicide for Canada to get involved, if it came to fighting.

So how about a revolution? Here, the left’s chances look better. They control the press, the bureaucracy, the schools and universities, the professions. In day to day terms, their hands are already on the levels of power. And they control the inner cities.

But if it came to actual shooting, again, they look as if they are at a disadvantage. In past revolutions, like the French or the Russian, controlling the capital or the big city was vitally important. But it may not be so any more, thanks to our vastly improved communications. The hinterland gets immediate news, and can make their own voice heard. So it is hard for one mob in one place to carry the day.

On the other hand, the crucial issue in any of the classic revolutions in the past has been the attitude of the army. The turning point always comes when the army refuses to fight the crowd.

Here, it seems that the Trump forces have the advantage. Both the military and the police forces are probably on the Republican side. The more so since Black Lives Matter has been demonizing the cops. The more so since Trump has appointed prominent and well-respected military men to top administration posts. And promised more money for the military. Any civilians with guns are also likely to be Trump supporters, given the left’s fight for gun control.

So, if it comes to fighting in the streets, most of the weaponry and military discipline will be on one side. If it comes to a quick attempted coup, they had better be ready to face tank turrets below their office windows within days.

This being so, it seems like suicide for the left to be taking to the barriers now, refusing to work within the system as it stands, in which they are favoured, and fighting against open discussion, free speech and democratic mechanisms. It is a spectacular case of historical blindness and arrogance.

And if anyone tries to warn them, they are the enemy.

I wonder if it is a case of their own guilty consciences demanding they be found out and punished. It is said to be so, for example, for serial murderers, that they secretly want to be caught, and will keep taking risks and leaving clues until they are.

The Erinyes are out, and are taking no prisoners.

Seeing the End of America's Threescore Years and Ten

This one lasted about 100 years on top.

In his 1985 state of the union address, Ronald Reagan said “We must stand by all our democratic allies. And we must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.”

How dated does that sound, 28 years later?

Many are now saying the USA is in decline. And it is true. Not necessarily economically or culturally; but it has definitely declined on the world stage over the past few years, in terms of its diplomatic power.

This might seem surprising only twenty or twenty-five years after the US won the Cold War, “ending history” as we know it and establishing itself as the sole world hyperpower. Shouldn’t we now have total American world hegemony? Instead, almost at the instant of its greatest success, America is retreating everywhere.

The last days of the Berlin Wall.

But there should be no surprise at this. The dynamic here is inevitable; it is why we need never fear any kind of world hegemony or one world government. The whole idea is a will-o-the-wisp. It’s all swamp gas. For better or for worse, it can’t happen.

It takes a sense of clear and present danger to motivate any group of people to pay the price and bear the burden to arrive at great power. Otherwise, it just isn’t worth it; especially for a democracy. The game is never worth the candle. As a result, there is no way to move from a bipolar to a unipolar world. The instant all serious opposition is overcome is the instant any organization either drops its guard and stops taking care of business, or splits into warring factions.

Conversely, any nation or movement that suddenly lunges for world power will automatically arouse opposition substantial enough to make it unlikely to succeed—as it begins to appear to others as a clear and present danger. So any nation that openly seeks world power won’t get it; any nation that gets close to world dominance will be there because it does not want it.

In Reagan’s day, the Soviet Union still looked like a world-wide threat; an "evil empire," or empire of evil. His call for sacrifice made sense to the American people. Now, it does not. If there is a threat to the US from Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda is in the end just a handful of conspirators. An evil gang, not an empire. Moreover, the simpler way to avoid the threat seems to be to withdraw from the Middle East, rather than continue to fight. China’s rise may trouble some geopolitical thinkers, but it is a hard sell to the American public, so long as they derive obvious and immediate benefits from that rise, in cheap goods.

So in the natural course of things, the US will probably fall back now into isolationism. We will slip back from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, as before WWII, but with new players.