In Defense Of Canadians

But, you say, people run magazines and papers to interest a public, not to indoctrinate for highly political reasons. As an answer I say look at the National Post. It has lost huge sums of money each year for its seven years. This last year alone it lost $10 million. We are told Capitalists don’t keep afloat ventures that lose them millions and millions of dollars. And they don’t – unless the venture has another purpose. The purpose of the National Post, which floods out financial loss, is to indoctrinate Canadians to hate Canadian democracy and to replace it with the unbridled rule of capitalist greed. And so Maclean’s – Canada’s national magazine, with many of the same purposes– glibs along with “personalities” and glitter, the intention of which is to displace Canada and put ordinary Canadians where they belong, in the ditch, out of sight. Just glance at the September 12 feature article, a minute-by-minute,14 page, off-the-spot report on New Orleans by someone who wasn’t there. That must be a first for journalism. What’s important is the 14 page feature has nothing to tell us. But, wait, you say. For Canada, big issues are present in the U.S./New Orleans tornado fiasco, having to do with free trade, NORAD, NATO – any kind of trust relation with the nation that vomitted up, for all to see, racism, vicious class division, uncontrolled anarchy in administration, contempt for human life, and a top leadership visibly a part of U.S. corporate indifference. The 14 page feature article says nothing. So much blather. Unstated, it says a Canadian who adopts one of the sleaziest, most violent cities in the U.S.A. as home is, like, cool man. Then there’s the total mind-rape of the article on the expiry of NORAD (the North American Defense agreement) in May of 2006 – and of moves towards its renewal. With the triumph of U.S. chaos at New Orleans in full view, the new NORAD, we are told, is to be broadened so the U.S. can help manage Canadian natural disasters when they occur. The writer is serious? A bi-national planning team was set up, the writer tells us, to consider the future of NORAD. Oh, was it? Was there parliamentary debate on the advisability of setting up such a team? If so, I didn’t hear of it. And who, exactly is on it? From what the writer says, the planning team seems to be made up of U.S. and Canadian military people. They won’t, of course, be biased. The planning team decided – get this – that “both militaries needed a new culture”. Should we re-work that coy expression to say what it means? Okay. It means the U.S. should have the right (and Canada’s military should know it) to enter Canada “pre-authorized” if it believes emergency is evident to it – “without having to seek the political permission to do so”. That license to invasion is suggested for a “North American” U.S-run defense organization that always has a U.S. top officer and which openly keeps much information from Canadians. Relax. The article tells us neither the Canadian politicians nor the U.S. ones want a single command on such questions. In fact, the U.S. doesn’t need the public relations flak of such a surrender. If it wants to enter Canada, it will. As a U.S. official put it: “NORAD essentially works”. What is more, as the writer tells us, Paul Martin has committed Canada to U.S. missile-shield action as a part of the old NORAD while pretending to refuse to sign a new agreement on Star Wars. “The old NORAD”. What is the old NORAD? It is and was a fraud from the start. An agreement was rushed in 1957 just after Louis St. Laurent’s Liberals were thrown out in favour of John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives. It is said John Diefenbaker was approached by military and civil servants (people not unlike Kenneth Whyte, perhaps). They convinced him that an agreement had been made (when it had not been) for integration of the RCAF and the USAF for defense of the continent. He said, “I see” or something to that effect. They said: “Just sign here”. It took nearly a year to get the signature on paper because some people smelled a rat, not without foundation. When the Cuban missile crisis erupted in 1962, the U.S. claimed to be able to command Canadian forces because of NORAD and because the continent was in an emergency, they said. Diefenbaker said “No”, and the cabinet went into overtime discussion. Diefenbaker’s Defense Minister Douglas Harkness, some argue, went – in an act of sedition – behind the cabinet’s back and told top Canadian officers to follow U.S. orders. At that time and since that time many top Canadian officers have ached to surrender command of Canadian forces to the U.S. That’s why the 20 U.S. people and the 20 Canadian people – many of them military – recommended Canada surrender its political control of Canada and Canadian military forces to the U.S.A. In the article about NORAD, called “All For One?” Luiza CH. Savage doesn’t tell any of the formative history of the organization. Then we move on to an 8-page “personality” section on George Jonas, reactionary Hungarian immigrant to Canada, interviewed by Kenneth Whyte. In a studio photograph Jonas stares out at the viewer suggestively, like one of the Francis Bacon paintings of disintegrating Popes: not a bad symbol for the feature. The title of the section is PROVOCATION, meaning we should expect to be shocked. Whyte, it would seem, sees Jonas as a sophisticated European. We Bush Canadians, however, know all about sophisticated Europeans. There is a genuinely sophisticated European: gracious, tasteful, unpretentious, and socially engaging without being self-effacing. Such Europeans exist, of both sexes. Then there is the European who claims sophistication. We might call that type the Swamp Sophisticate.. The Bush Canadian is not at all impressed by the Swamp Sophisticate. It is a type that claims sophistication in matters of sex, alcohol use, and other such socially indicative matters. Jonas gives himself away on the matter of sophistication in his discussion of Barbara Amiel and Adrienne Clarkson. The language Jonas uses is unsuitable to the subject – for reasons of sophistication. Describing the young Adrienne Clarkson, he uses the term “poise” when he should use the word “elegance”. The young Adrienne Clarkson was elegant in manner, movement, and in her regard for others. She reminds Jonas, in that characteristic, almost predictably, of a “society matron” (in Hungary, doubtless). Barbara Amiel, on the other hand, is named “mischievous”. The word is wrong. Amiel was darker than mischievous. She appeared, rather, to be compulsively self-involved to some. Jonas tells of taking her to a Lakeshore Boulevard (Toronto) restaurant, she wearing a faux see-through dress. Amiel walked boldly across the room to the table. Jonas tells us that – “By the time she reached her table at the other end, there was total silence” in a room that had been full of chatter. In a summary, Jonas philosophizes that there were deep differences between the two women. He says: “There were immense differences reaching far deeper on many other levels, but if you wanted to represent the difference in a movie scene that would have been it”. Jonas is describing an indefinable magic he saw (and married for a time) in Barbara Amiel, which Adrienne Clarkson, apparently, lacked. But, unfortunately, he gives evidence of not understanding elegance or, indeed, mischief. What Jonas doesn’t seem to realize is that if a really naked bag lady (instead of Barbara Amiel) had walked across the restaurant room possessed by a kind of compulsive self-involvement – by the time she reached the table at the other end, there would have been total silence in a room that had been full of chatter. Both Adrienne Clarkson and Barbara Amiel have ended up according to style. Clarkson is with the popular intellectual, John Ralston Saul. Barbara Amiel has ended up with Conrad Black, Lord Black of Doublecross Harbour. Another article in the same Maclean’s, “Presumptions of Guilt” comments about Black’s business interests. “If just one half of the allegations are true [concerning the operations of the Black enterprise, Hollinger International, it will] go down as one of the ugliest cases of corporate mismanagement on record”. One might begin to conclude that a Swamp Sophisticate is not only faux-sophisticated but also dangerously glib. For someone like Kenneth Whyte that glibness probably gives evidence of philosophic depths to the person Whyte calls, in this uncertain case,“the erudite George Jonas”. We have seen Jonas take on Clarkson and Amiel. Readers may judge that as just so much meaningless trivia. But his account of Canada is NOT trivia. Nor is it shocking. It is simply a sign of the increasing boldness of the group that wants to destroy Canadian democracy. What Jonas calls “the Canadian Way” is in “the first place [when it is] put in the company of Nazism and Communism”. It is so because, for Jonas, like Nazism and Communism, Canada has made an assault on liberalism. The “liberalism” here assaulted is the so-called liberalism that permits huge class divisions, racism, visible injustice – in fact, the chaos of New Orleans in tornado. Jonas says: “other ideologies [Nazism and Communism] may be much more brutal and cruder but the Canadian Way may achieve a higher level of success. The Canadian Way is simply statism with a human face.” What Jonas is saying, quite simply, is that Nazism and Communism made the state triumphant, used it to terrorize whole populations, imprisoned unjustly, tortured, murdered, and otherwise violated huge numbers to serve the power interests of a ruling group. Canada, which has used the power of the state to provide old age pensions, universal medicare, high standards of public education, a measure of unemployment assistance, a limited control on rapacious capitalism, and a public broadcasting system that has provided unique creative possibilities for innumerable people (among them George Jonas), is statist, and in the same family as“statist” Nazism and Communism. What he means by saying that Canada is“in the first place [when] put in the company of Nazism and Communism” and perhaps achieving“ a higher level of success” is left for the reader to figure out. But there is hardly any doubt he means our democratic system, which he chooses to call “statist”, is undesirable, apparently repressing the wonderful forces that would give us private medicine, seniors in dire poverty, totally class controlled education, unleashed capitalist greed, groveling unemployed workers, and nothing but greed-driven private broadcasting in the country. Now that’s sophistication for you. One suspects that those comments by Jonas secured him an 8 page “personality” feature in Maclean’s. How does a Right Wing magazine in Canada glibly suggest to its readers that Canada’s state involvement in the health and security of all Canadians is the kind that results in Nazism and Communism and, even if not that, is of the same order? The Right wing magazine interviews someone who will say it for the magazine. Jonas may say different things in the book to be published that motivated the interview. But we can only deal with the interview, for that is what is presented to us. At that point, Maclean’s Magazine doesn’t become merely a mild supporter of the Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, Peter Mackay world. It becomes - many reasonable people might conclude - a savage and corrupt purveyor of Yellow Journalism in the cause of the erasure of Canada. Revolution anyone? Sometimes the on-going sell-out of Canada is hard to talk about it’s so prevalent in our lives. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about because we don’t see it. Canada’s media barons give evidence of total sell-out so consistently their betrayal is often hard to see. And a “national magazine” like Maclean’s, which Canadians trusted for decades, is now a reactionary rag, and Canadians are encouraged to think it’s the same old Maclean’s. Sometimes the on-going sell-out is hard to talk about because it is so prevalent in our lives, and so hard to see.