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"Oh the Urbanity" a Canadian YouTuber just put out a video titled "Donald Trump is 100% serious about annexing Canada" where I think he puts forward a really convincing argument for the title argument, and for why it needs to be taken seriously.
I won't force you to watch the video but here it is, I'll give you his 13 points for it and explain them.
1: "Repeated preoccupation"
This isn't just a "one off brain fart" like a lot of Trump's rhetoric, he's been consistent about it over and over again. From Trump himself "So when I say they should be a state, I mean that, I really mean that"
2: "Aides say he's serious."
Includes a tweet from White House Deputy Chief of Staff to take him at face value and sources to CNN reporting other aides say similar, take his claims seriously.
3: "Canada says he's serious"
Some of the politicians in Canada believe that Trump is very serious about this threat too.
4: "Questioned our border"
He's talked about believing the Canadian/US border to be illegitimate (Something he also points out is that Trump has not done the same with Mexico) and that this is the rhetoric used before trying to take over another country.
5: "Loves big real estate deals."
Trump is narcissistic and loves to put his names on things and claim big accomplishments. "Is there any bigger real estate deal than doubling the land mass of the USA?"
6: "Fits into his world view"
Urbanity believes Trump has a view of great powers dominating over their local spheres of influence
7: "Threatened other countries"
He's talked about this with other countries like Panama and Greenland, showing the expansionist mindset. Along with the reported plans being developed for a potential Panama invasion.
8: "Consider his influences"
People that Trump likes are Pat Buchanan (who has talked about taking Canada and Greenland before) and McKinley (Trump's favorite president) who annexed multiple territories.
9: "Admires Vladimir Putin"
Trump has shown a lot of respect to Putin before and often victim blames Ukraine for being invaded.
10: "Pretexts like Drug Cartels"
They're trying to claim that Canada has been taken over by drug cartels and they need to wage a war to take it back from harming the country. It sounds like the Bush administration talking about WMDs.
11: "Spins Canada as abuser"
They talk about things like Doug Ford putting a tax on electricity exports as an "act of war" by Canada, and treat retaliatory tariffs as unprovoked aggression.
12: "Information Bubble"
Trump lives in an information bubble where the main sources he listens to are the ones that feed from him like Fox News. His ideas about Canada wanting to be taken over from Fox News talking about "Maple MAGA" likely reinforce his desire even more.
13: "No Personal Morals"
Urbanity views Trump as a man who has scammed people before with various business projects, shitcoins and the like. There's little reason to expect he wouldn't disregard the sovereignty of other nations.
While he doesn't mention this, I personally think another major point to consider is that Trump is not consistent on what he wants from Canada. One day he says it's the trade deficit, next day he says its drugs, then the next day its immigrants, the next day he says nothing can be done at all and he just wants the state. It sounds like excuses just being made up based off how he feels that day.
Urbanity goes on to argue that even if the threat isn't likely, it is no reason to take it as less serious. The main thing being that Trump is enacting a trade war, which is still causing serious harm to the Canadian economy and their people.
Like if a mafiaso moved in next door and started joking about killing you. Even if the chance was low, it's understandable to take their words seriously. "Threats don't have to be higher than a 50% chance to take them seriously"
He draws a corollary to Ukraine where there was a lot of disbelief and doubt about Russia invading in 2022, until as we're all aware, it happened. "But they did it"
All in all I think this is very convincing that Trump really does want to annex Canada and that we as a society should be taking that possibility seriously. And as Urbanity also points out, even if it's unpopular now, Trump's followers and the Republican party have been shown to be rather flexible at following his lead against their prior beliefs. They might be against him in 2025, but what about 2026 or 2027 when they've had years of Fox News and Trump speeches repeating the stories of Canadian Cartels and "Acts of War"?
So for discussion, there's a few questions.
Do you think Trump has serious intentions to annex Canada? Is it right of him or wrong of him to do this? If he does ramp up rhetoric (or efforts) to annex or invade, would you wish for the Republicans to oppose him or continue to support him as duly elected president? And how likely is it that Trump will transform from his rhetoric to serious action (beyond the trade wars)?
well why not? Canada is an uncountry, comprised of no one, & representing nothing.
Canadians do not even exist. There is no Canadian history and no Canadian culture. There is a Quebecois/First Nations history, and any annexation of Quebec/First Nations should be negotiated separately. But Canada is merely a term of geography in which nations reside, not a nation in itself. Not a controversial idea. The government proclaims it regularly, lest anyone look back farther than June 15th, 1964.
Maybe there was once a culture called Canada. But it's long dead now. Canada is now Terra Nullis. It's for no one and belongs to no one. So annexation is completely acceptable.
You -- like Putin -- seem to be under the impression that a countries right to exist is contingent on the worth of its culture as judged by you. You are wrong.
My position is that basically all international borders are accidents of history, but should be treated as sacrosanct, because having a pointless war is much worse than having a random border.
Also, most of your arguments could just as well applied to the US. I will spare you the stale jokes about US culture, but notice that the US -- while it labels itself a nation -- is just a federation of individual states. So why should not Canada annex Seattle instead?
But then again, you are likely just trolling.
Europe is divided along ethnic lines. Germany is where Germans live, France is where French people live, Poland is for the Poles.
And then there is civic nationalism and unnatural borders. Civic nationalism is the hellish melting pot of the US&A. Its borders do not matter because they're arbitrary. They happen to be what they are. But there are no Americans, really, to draw the borders around. And there are no Canadians either.
Unnatural borders are what we see in Africa and much of the third world. They are marks of colonialism. Straight lines on maps, drawn with a disregard for the people. Then, ethnic conflict is present, always.
There are only a few exceptions where unnaturally drawn borders hold despite differences in ethnicity. Singapore, Switzerland, UAE, etc. But these exceptions are of mutual economic and political benefit. They exist only in prosperity. Money holds them together.
But even here, why does Denmark have a say over Greenland? Ukraine over Donbass? Or Canada over Quebec? Outside the current legalistic status quo, I don't think they have a claim over those ethnically distinct regions.
Borders should be drawn around an ethnos. But there is no Canadian ethnicity. It's only a matter of time before that particular politico-economical assemblage dissolves or is subsumed by some other larger entity.
Look at a bunch of maps of Germany from 1914 to 1945, and you will notice that things are not quite as simple. Why is Austria its own thing, but Bavaria is not? These are all accidents of history. Culturally and ethnically, someone whose ancestors have been living in what is now Germany just across the Austrian border is certainly closer to Austrians than someone whose ancestors lived on a now German island in the North Sea.
Except that Brittany and Corsica are kinda their own thing ethnically, and that is before we go to the oversea departments.
A straight border just means that when the border was drawn, no stakeholder cared where exactly it ran, and yes, this generally was because they were colonizers and there were no pre-existing white communities.
The thing to understand is that for thousands of years, the borders between what would eventually become European ethnostates were redrawn every few decades in blood. The world did not suddenly spawn in 1945, with God drawing a neat line about the various ethnicities which He would grant statehood, carefully sorting every village to the correct side. Mostly it was the other way round, historically. Here is the border (e.g. the front line at armistice), and if you are not happy with the nationality this bestows upon you, you can just flee a few tens (or hundreds) of kilometers to a country more to your liking.
Straight borders in Africa are bad because they tend to split ethnic groups. However, I think ethnic conflicts would happen even if the colonizers had taken great care to respect ethnic boundaries. At the end of the day, every small ethnicity having a state the size of Lichtenstein is not stable. Land is a valuable resource, and conflicts about it were likely a human universal from the stone age till the recently.
North America is a bit special in that it was only thinly populated by steppe nomads (who murdered each other over territorial conflicts like everyone did). If Canada and the US had coexisted a thousand more years on a medieval tech level, I would guarantee that their border would look just as "natural" as in Europe.
The legalistic status quo is an excellent reason, because the alternative is historically a lot of bloodshed. Now, I am sympathetic to peoples right to self-determination, and if the Scots had voted for leaving the UK, I would be a-ok with it. Nor do I have a problem with colonies breaking away from their colonizers (even if they lack a distinct ethnicity, e.g. the 13 colonies the English lost in North America).
Yes. If the Austrians see themselves as Austrians, they're Austrians and not Germans. But if in a hundred years these same Austrians give up their Austrianness, and start calling themselves German and the Germans go along with it, they'll be German. The cultural and ethnic minutiae will be best understood by their respective peoples. And the borders should be reflective of these attitudes.
Yes, these are minorities in France, much the same way there are Arab and African minorities in France. And there will be either separatism or assimilation. There will be tensions. If those ethnically distinct regions want independence, they should get independence.
You are a colonialist. I fundamentally disagree with you. Even if you think small ethnicity-based states aren't "stable," forcing artificial borders upon a diverse people is much worse. But as a compromise, can we at least maybe not have very clearly multi-ethnic paper nations? The Québécois and the "Canadians" are nothing alike. Let them have their independence.
The bloodshed occurs precisely because the borders aren't drawn along ethnic lines. The legalistic status quo suppresses ethnic realities.
I tend toward a soft colonialism just because I think it’s actually more peaceful and stable, while allowing for the development of land and resources that ethnic tribes might not be able to do.
It’s more peaceful because as I see it the “every tribe needs and deserves a state” is a cause of strife, rather than a prevention for that strife. Most ethnic groups are too small or weak to actually achieve independence. They assert a right the global elite tell them they have, but they actually can’t for geopolitical reasons. Palestinians will never have a state. They cannot take one any more than the Cherokee could in America. But the Cherokee who were sent to a reservation in 1840 or so live in relative peace and safety because they are not trying to assert a “right” they don’t have and frankly never did. Palestinians are still fighting, and committing war crimes while doing so, because they came to the same position in the post war world where everyone is entitled to an ethnostate. Who’s better off, Cherokee or Palestinians? And in some cases like Ukraine, they’re “independent” but their neighbors are much stronger than they are and thus they must go along mostly with that stronger neighbor because they can’t afford to get in a war they’d lose.
It’s more stable because it doesn’t have various tribes fighting over strips of land nearby for farming right, water rights, minerals, or strategic advantage. The border is drawn and that’s it.
It allows for development because the most advanced society tends to run the empire and thus have the technology and skill to extract resources and use the land efficiently. Britain knows how to run a mine. It’s rather doubtful that the Zulu can do the same. If some rich natural resources sit under Zulustan they’ll stay there because people who live in mud huts can’t run a mine like the British can.
What strife, exactly? And between whom?
Shouldn't there logically be less conflict among ethnically homogeneous nations than in a multi-ethnic state (especially a colonial one)? It's the forcing of different ethnicities to exist within one arbitrary state that causes conflict. Each ethnicity being its own nation and political entity effectively solves this internal tension.
But you maintain that even with these ethnic tensions fully resolved, this plurality of newly independent nations would soon be launched into brutal conflict with each other. Because of what? Resources? Power struggles?
Resources can, and have always been, traded. Indigenous tribes trade just fine with each other. Why would these nations suddenly go to war any more than European nations have since 19th-century ethnic nationalism?
And conflict due to expansion beyond reasonable means doesn't make sense either, as the expanding nation would soon turn into the very multi-ethnic hodgepodge of a state with arbitrarily drawn borders we're trying to avoid.
Palestinians are fighting against Israeli colonialism. Israel is actively genociding Palestinians. They could've ☪☮e✡is✝-ed, even after the Zionists took Palestinian lands and established and ethnostate (good). But that wasn't enough for Israel. They couldn't stop. And expanded beyond. And it's too late to stop now. If Palestinians ever establish a functioning state, the Jews will be wiped from existence. But that's what you get for your colonialism.
Israel and Palestine deserve each other.
Colonial, or otherwise arbitrary, borders lock ethnically diverse, hostile groups into zero-sum struggles within states. Ethnically homogeneous nations reduce these internal tensions. And external disputes can be handled through trade or treaties, as has been historically done. But colonial borders don't change as easily.
The Africans seemingly still live in mud huts despite all the benevolence of colonialism.
Israel and Palestine are a result of the rules based international order creating a perception of a “right to an ethnic homeland, and forcing both sides into internationally coerced “ceasefires” and land swaps that have kept the two from fighting the long war they’ve been in since 1948 to its conclusion. It’s not a natural phenomenon in the least. The reason we’re still watching this flare up about every decade is that it’s a war that isn’t being finished. If the war in 1948 had been fought until capitulation as wars were until we decided that we’d rather have a series of stalemates, then one way or another it wou be over. Either Palestinians would be conquered and living under the thumb of the Jews or the reverse, but whoever lost would understand and likely accept their fate, and would consider themselves an ethnic minority in a nation rather than continuing to attempt to force a state they don’t have the military ability to actually claim. We did the same in the American south. Once Georgia was burned and looted they understood that whether they liked it or not, they were part of the United States and would remain so.
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