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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24130 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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*Treason in Canada

Background:

  • CSIS (intelligence agency) whistleblower leaks that hostile foreign governments have substantial influence in Canada, including influence over MPs, and no one is doing anything about it.
  • An inquiry was eventually triggered. The secret report was recently released to certain parties. The report states that multiple MPs willingly assisted hostile foreign governments in actions against the interest of Canadians. The full text of the report is not public and the names of those MPs are not publically known.
  • Trudeau is the PM, and his office controls security clearances and classification. CSIS doesn’t have prosecutorial or police power. RCMP (federal law enforcement) has investigative power, but reports directly to the PM. Moreover, much of the info in the report was gained from CSIS intelligence or five-eyes intelligence, which makes the conversion from intelligence to legally admissible evidence very difficult. Regardless, there appears to be no ongoing RCMP investigation.
  • The question of whether the facts in the report can become legally admissible evidence in a particular trial are largely irrelevant to the political problem of treasonous MPs.
  • It is widely assumed that MPs from multiple parties are involved, but that Liberal MPs likely make up a majority. Everyone expects China to have the most influence, followed by India.
  • The other major parties, CPC and NDP, have called for the names to be released.
  • Trudeau’s party, the Liberals, refuse to make any of the MPs names public. In one parliamentary exchange over making the issue, a liberal MP said “Boo Hoo! Get over it!”
  • Prior to this, Trudeau and the Liberals have been tanking in the polls, and a new election is expected in 2025; a landslide Conservative victory is expected. Now, Canadians are going into an election where they will have to vote for MPs without knowing which MPs are literal traitors.

--

This seems to be a legit constitutional crisis (for lack of a better term) for Canada. If nothing happens and the names don’t get released, I would expect substantial ramifications for Canadian society. I would expect foreign influence to sky rocket and for corruption in the Canadian parliament to become an open market. If the government is willing protect treasonous MPs, even when they are all but publically outed, why would hostile parties not just openly buy as many MPs as possible?

I would also expect this situation to cause faith in the government to plummet and for separatist sentiment in Quebec and the Prairies to increase. Trudeau has publically opposed the concept of Canadian nationhood/sovereignty. For example, he said that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity and that he views Canada is the world’s first “postnational state.” He has also presided over an aggressive immigration policy which has put incredible pressure on the social fabric, on the housing market, and on health care. Now, on top of all this, is an openly treasonous government.

Will this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? I'm surprised there isn't more news and discussion about this. @KulakRevolt can we get a QRD from the inside?

*As is true of the US, I’m sure there is a technical definition of treason in Canadian law. Whether the actions of any particular MP rise to that level does not change the political implications.

For example, he said that there is no such thing as a Canadian identity and that he views Canada is the world’s first “postnational state.”

I've been trying to put into words why I'm against open borders and I think this is the piece I needed to understand my inherent distrust. A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory. Other - real - nations can exploit that territory without regard for the people. The government of a nation is elected by the people to put their common good first.

Trudeau sees himself as some sort of steward of Canada's natural resources and land. His "postnational state" denies the existence of a category called "Canadian people." There is the land of Canada, and the people currently inhabiting it which he has jurisdiction over. But without having a category of Canadian people to even reference, his decisions are not sourced in what is the well-being of the Canadian people and their decedents.

A post-national state does not have a people, it has a territory.

Strictly speaking, a post-national state need only lack a people defined by common birth or shared ancestry, and can have one defined in other ways. One can argue that nation-states are a superior form of social organization to those other ways, but they are neither untried nor historically novel (e.g. Rome, Islam).

I'm not sure ancient Rome is the correct analogy here. Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship. It did happen, but it took hundreds of years. Even as late as 100 BC, when Rome was already master of the Mediterranean Sea, many cities and towns within 100 miles of Rome were merely "allies" and not citizens. This caused the Social War (91–87 BC) in which Rome was forced to offer citizenship to some "allies" in order to suppress the others.

It wasn't until three hundreds years later, (212 AD) under the reign of the notorious tyrant Caracalla, that the citizenship was extended to all free men in the Empire. By then, many people didn't actually want it, and the reason it was granted was to extract more tax revenues.

Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans. When it offered citizenship to others, it was generally from a position of weakness. I will concede that the Romans held out for a long time.

Rome was quite stingy with offering citizenship.

While they were in most respects stingy by modern standards, the fact that they had any form of naturalization at all was a radical break from all of their Mediterranean neighbors e.g. Athens where only people with two citizen parents were citizens themselves or Sparta with its permanent helot underclass, and this contributed to Roman military dominance as they were able to radically increase their available manpower over time. I also think the sort of mass granting of citizenship to allies as a reward for military service that Rome engaged in would be seen as radical even today, something akin to the US giving all inhabitants of Sonora citizenship in exchange for them suppressing the cartels (the closest modern equivalent might be the French Foreign Legion, which is relatively small).

Rome was ascendant when it was a nation state composed of Romans.

If we're going by the standard chronology, where the zenith of Roman power is the death of Trajan in 117 AD, then I don't see how this is true. 2 of the 5 Good Emperors were Iberians and no one seems to have cared, not to mention the long string of Illyrian emperors who ended the third century crises and founded one, if not the greatest of Roman cities i.e. Constantinople. On that note, the fact that a bunch of Greeks went around for a thousand years calling themselves Romans seems evidence enough of the assimilatory power of Roman institutions (interestingly enough these Romans functioned more and more like a nation as they lost territory and became weaker, but it certainly wasn't the same as the original nation).

Good points all around. My person take is that Rome reached its zenith with the fall of Carthage. The territorial gains for the next 200 years were just the inevitable consolidation. But I recognize this might be a minority view.

And you are right to mention Sparta which largely died out because of sub replacement level fertility.

Sparta’s actual fertility rate is unknown; citizen oliganthropia in Sparta was caused by runaway inequality driving citizens below the property requirements for citizenship.

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