The Canada Question

America vs. The International Right

[Written with all love to Canadians and their Hoth-like homeland.]

So the other day, I set off some controversy by critiquing the theories of one Neema Parvini, writing at The Forbidden Texts, prompted in the first place by an essay he’d written some two weeks ago now where he lambasted the right as being nothing but a swamp of slop, personified by Donald Trump. To illustrate his point, Parvini blamed Trump for the misfortunes of the right in Europe, claiming that his hard-line acquisitiveness regarding Greenland was destroying any prospects of success for them. This seemed like an odd line of criticism to me (not least because the man so worried about the future of rightist thought does not consider himself a rightist), but I certainly underestimated its appeal among a subset of rightist fans of his work. Amidst the chorus of JEW JEW JEW there were those who advanced a more substantive response to my two essays on the the subject of slop on the right, and they deserve a response.

Some people simply echoed Parvini’s point about Trump destroying the international right with his saber-rattling and general bombast. Parvini seemed to think as well that the shooting deaths of two communist agitators in Minneapolis discredited Trump’s regime abroad, along with his policy of aggressive deportation, and so far as I can tell none of my critics from among his disciples disputed that. The two essays I wrote evoked some pretty strong emotions, and I was somewhat surprised to see people from other countries expressing more anger at the President of the US than their own leaders and countrymen. Perhaps that reflects some provincialism on my part. Nonetheless, this view is misguided.

I’ve addressed this in places in individual responses, but in sum, the idea that the success of the international right is somehow bound up with the whims of MAGA is either true or isn’t. If it’s true that Trump is a more important issue than anything else in your country, such that he can determine electoral outcomes and the popular appeal of rightist, you are not a free people. You are not a free people in any case, because you live under oppressive regimes that inundate you with foreigners, propagandize you to accept it, and censors and jails you if you don’t. But I can see the appeal of shifting the blame to Trump, since you’re allowed to do that on the internet, as opposed to blaming anyone actually responsible, and I can understand why people would gravitate towards an entire politics of impotent rationalization to cope.

“See, elites run everything, and the popular will means nothing, so there’s nothing anyone can do while the elites hash out among them who will run things, and nothing ever changes, and also Donald Trump riding to power on a popular mandate and changing things is what’s screwing up our situation over here. Donald Trump implementing right wing ideas in America is a threat to right wing ideas everywhere.”

But the theory falls apart at the level of basic political logic. One poster, Critic of the Cathedral, kept asking me, how I’d feel if “Europeans” were demanding Alaska from the US. Well, I suppose my response would be to vote for Donald Trump (I don’t really believe in democracy, but go with it), on the grounds that, of the available candidates, he would be the one most likely to successfully defend Alaska from foreign invasion. When American interests are threatened, I support the people who I believe will uphold them. My reaction would be to become more nationalistic/patriotic/extreme. The response my critics seem to think normal and appropriate is

URGGGG that Donald Trump makes me SOOOOO HECKIN’ MAD when he talks about seizing Greenland that I’m going reject even the faint shadow of a nationalist like him who might do something about it and instead support communists who would happily hand over anything demanded of them, since they are cowards and also since we have little to fight with apart from the gear Americans provide and pay for. While they’re failing to defend the territory I suddenly care so much about, they’ll also import tens of millions of people from the rapeyer parts of the globe, but it’s a small price to pay because that will sure show that evil Trump, somehow.

My critics themselves might not think that’s a good plan, but they seem to believe their countrymen do, and thus Trump’s rhetoric equals their political powerlessness.

The above picture is from a contemporary US History textbook’s section on Canada, from which I derived all the information in this essay.

This points to a wider cultural problem. We see this closer to home (my home). ImperialistCanuck wrote a lengthy response agreeing with the general critique noted earlier, criticizing my piece from a Canadian perspective. He stated:

I can’t speak for the Europeans, but I can speak for the Canadian Right. Which isn’t the Cons. Or the PPC. It’s groups like the Dominion Society of Canada. Or the Second Sons of Canada. We’re fighting to reclaim our homes from the degenerates running our nation. We’re growing. People are waking up. But Trump and MAGA is absolutely fucking it up for us.

Every time we make a little progress, MAGA says or does something that riles up all the Canadian normies and distracts them from the real domestic issues we’re trying to bring attention to. Whether it’s Greenland or Trump making open or insuated [sic] threats towards us, it sets us back. MAGA doesn’t seem indifferent to nationalists reclaiming our homes, they seem actively hostile to it.

This is basically the political heuristic I outlined above. The Canadian public would otherwise be predisposed to rightist ideas, but because those ideas are associated with Trump, they reject them. An American is threatening Canadian sovereignty, and for the beflannelled normies of the north, the solution is to vote for Canadians who threaten Canadian sovereignty. I was a bit hesitant to accept the wisdom of defending the Maple Tundra from the US by dividing it between India and China instead, and to this rejoinder ImperialistCanuck offered this:

You mentioned our dynamic, how we react to Trump’s rhetoric, as a “problem”. It is not. It is a feature of Canadians. It is baked into our psyche. The thing about Canada is that it was founded as an explicit rejection of the American and later French Revolutions. Our Anglo half was founded by the American Loyalists, those who chose loyalty to the Crown at the costof [sic] everything. Their homes, their livelihoods and even their very lives. Our French half, the oldest and most established of Canada, rejected the French Revolution and refused to embrace its ideals. We are at our core a reactionary, illiberal culture that chose to build a civilization out of fhe [sic] harsh wilderness rather than follow after the American liberal project. We’ve spent our entire EXISTENCE resisting American expansionism. It became a cornerstone of the Canadian national identity. That’s why we react do [sic] strongly to the 51st State rhetoric. It’s our blood memory. And that’s why, even if Trump is sending a message to the others it’s still screwing us. He is triggering an existential and generational fear of EXTINCTION and the external threat is always more apparent than the internal threat.

So I’ve heard this theory of Canadian political order before, and I think it’s true in a sense, but there’s some important nuance missing in the framing. ImperialistCanuck mentions Fortissax, whom I’ve read on the subject and respect, and I’m also familiar with John Carter’s well-thought out relevant effortpoasting. As much as I yield to them as extremely knowledgeable lifelong Canadians, I can’t fully embrace their takes, because though they are largely accurate on one level, I feel like there’s something deeper they miss about America, something a lot of European and other Western rightists miss as well.

Above: A vampiric Laurentian elite negotiates with a provincial Albertan petrochud hockey enthusiast.

A thing can be both “a feature of the Canadian psyche” and a “problem;” they’re not mutually exclusive. In this particular case, they are in fact both true at once. I say in all charity and intending no offense: there is a problem with the Canadian psyche. I doubt any Canadian rightist would disagree concerning that general proposition. The dispute centers on what that is, exactly. But from what I’ve read, it all comes back to America, and to the alternating cycles of terror, resentment, smug dismissal, and terror once more that have led to Canadians constructing a society wholly around the American other.

We have a tradition down here, too. It’s called being awesome.

The characterization of the Loyalists in the comment is telling. They weren’t people who sacrificed everything for the crown, choosing exile over abandoning their monarchist principles. They were trimmers who rolled the dice on the very sensible proposition that their very powerful imperial government would crush the upstart Patriots and that they would be rewarded once it was all over. They bet wrong. They didn’t choose exile; it was chosen for them by their neighbors. New York basically ethnically cleansed them. In a sense, a major part of Canada’s national myth is the need to portray a defeat as some kind of moral victory. That’s not so bad in and of itself (I’m from the South, where this is normal). The problem is the habits of mind it can create, a stultifying need to preserve what is rather than asking deeper questions about what should be.

In this documentary, we see that Mel Gibson saved America by personally killing every loyalist he could find. But since he had to take a break to go to his son’s funeral, some of them escaped and moved to Winnepeg.

Thus we see the framing of Canada as reactionary and illiberal, over and against a liberal America. Canadians are loyal to king and country; Americans are dangerous revolutionaries. This, again, is plausible on one level, but ignores some more fundamental realities. The British monarchy of 1776 was itself liberal, the product of an explicit social contract between Parliament and the usurping Mary Stuart and her husband William of Orange. The English Bill of Rights is as thoroughly Lockean a document as the Declaration of Independence. The Hanoverian Dynasty that took over after the last of the Stuarts, the one in power during the founding of the US, was invited to rule mainly because it was foreign and would be easy for the grandees in Parliament to manage, as proved the case. If Canadians were reactionary and illiberal, they’d have been Jacobites, a plausible position even after the disaster of 1745. The main boeuf the Anglo Canadians have with their French neighbors is precisely the latter’s fondness for the absolute monarchy and Catholic Church they were conquered away from in 1763

Superficially, the American Revolution was indeed liberal and radical. Thomas Jefferson, probably the most radically liberal of the Founding Fathers, wrote that Declaration noted earlier that spelled out American rights in terms any Whig could appreciate. But even Jefferson, who would go on to support (and walk back his support) for the French Revolution, understood those rights not as abstractions, but rooted in tradition- he read Old English and believed that the English monarchy had gone off the rails not in 1776, but with the Norman Conquest. Americans didn’t reject monarchy; following the British pattern and the lessons of Classical antiquity (the Founders loved their Plutarch and Polybius) they made a new one, an elected head of state and government. President George had more power than King George. I could go on and talk about the powerful role that religion played in this reactionary spirit, or the most reactionary section, my beloved South, but space precludes such digressions. Suffice to say that, while there were liberal dimensions to it, the American Revolution was a revolution in the true sense, a return to something.

That return unleashed a titanic wave of violent creation on a continental scale. It’s true in a sense that Canada built a civilization out of the harsh wilderness, but nothing like to the degree the US did. Part of the reason the Americans rebelled against the crown was the latter’s conscious efforts, after the French and Indian War, to restrict American settlement to the lands east of the Appalachians. We wanted more and fought to have it, and once we threw off the British shackles the US exploded into the world.

Canada . . . not so much. Pretty much all Canadians live where the original Canadians settled, and nearly the whole population lives within 100 miles of the US border (I don’t know what that is in kilometers and no one cares). Where Canada did spread it did so largely peacefully, town by town, facing little in the way of resistance from the native peoples, and when they did, the problems were handled by Mounted Police. America fought, again and again, periodic eruptions of violent energy on the part of a young and dynamic people. We defeated the British at New Orleans (yes, they had burned DC, but that was in revenge for Americans torching York, Canada), and prevented England from handing over Louisiana to the Spanish. We defeated Mexico, the sick man of the Continent, preventing their blocking our progress west. One after another, America defeated the native peoples of the New World, the Five Civilized Tribes, the Plains Horse Nations, the wily remnants down to the last few desperadoes under Geronimo. And of course, most famously, we fought ourselves in the bloodiest war ever seen in North America, losing the equivalent of some 22 million people if the ratios were the same today. No one has ever done to America what America did to America.

Honestly, rebuilding it did more long-term damage.

There is no Canadian equivalent of Texas, not even a Missouri. California is a nation unto itself; the province of British Columbia boasts as many people as the Atlanta metro area, a third of whom are Chinese. It’s cold there, one might object. Well, Florida represents a terraforming project impossibly more difficult than settling the Yukon, a land lashed by hurricanes, baking in a languid, malarial tropical heat that- thanks to American energy and engineering prowess- is now home to more people than Ontario. And that’s not a dig at the snowbros; they’re a hardworking, talented, brave, and hardy people who have every means to surmount all the challenges of the New World. The basic issue that differentiates Americans from Canadians is not liberalism vs. reaction, it’s that the latter accepted a subordinate role in someone else’s empire, while the former chose to become one instead.

While I agree with much of what John Carter had to say about his homeland, Canada is not the Prussia of the North. It’s the Hesse of the North. It’s a pool of brave manpower meant to figure into the plans of others. In Carter’s retelling of Canada’s noble contributions in many wars, I was struck by the fact that none of them involved Canadians fighting for Canada. They fought as part of the British Empire; they fought as part of the Commonwealth, and they fought along with the UN. They crossed the border voluntarily to fight in Vietnam while a greater number of Americans fled north to avoid it. But the phrase “Canada declared war” does not appear in history books absent a bunch of more powerful allies in the same paragraph. Prussia had a very different historical experience.

Fun fact: About a third of the Hessians captured by the Americans during the Revolution voluntarily stayed there after the war.

It’s not that they didn’t have the opportunities. Alaska with all its riches was right there for the taking, yet no scrap with Russia. Imagine the Kingdom of Hawaii falling to predatory lumberjacks rather than American pineapple magnates. Canadians have boats and they’re quite capable of violence; heck, Prussia only had the latter. But not only was there never a Greater Canada, the existing one never quite reached its full potential. It’s a bit like a bonsai tree kept by small by restricting nutrients and careful pruning, which now languishes in the shade of a massive oak.

Grok shows us what might have been, though some of the Hawaiians have Zulu shields for some reason..

Why? Canadians aren’t reactionary. They’re conservative. They accept the world as it is- as it was given to them- and seek to preserve it. It’s why the Canadian right wants their flag with someone else’s flag on it back. It’s why they don’t have their own king. They should. I support that. Instead, like Australia, they live under the lash of a persistent culture cringe, seeking to be as English as they can be rather than as Canadian as possible.

I’m not saying the king should be John Mikl Thor; I’m just noting he’s still alive and has more stage presence than Charles III.

Being conservative is a wonderful instinct when the world around you is worth conserving. When it isn’t something else is required. The American Founding Fathers faced the choice of a stifling physical and cultural confinement or war against the most powerful empire on Earth. They made their decision, and the ones who chose otherwise moved to Canada. There was a time when that made a kind of sense. That time is long past.

There is little to imitate about today’s England, about deferring to a Britishness that itself is now in a state of apocalyptic flux. There is little, indeed, to recommend much of the Old World of the West, which tore itself to pieces in a series of generational cataclysms and decided that the solution to preventing WWIII was to teach the various nations of Europe to hate themselves so much they’d be unwilling to fight in their own interests. And yes, I recognize that America played a role in all of this. The managerial state is a largely American creation, the dark egregore of our gigantism, our materialism, and our drive to mastery of man and nature. But it’s not our only contribution to the state of things.

Reform Britain, weak. Restore Britain, better. I’m waiting for BRITAIN: VIOLENTLY REBORN!!!

America is the new Rome. Like the city on the Tiber, we were forged in the wilderness by outcasts and reprobates, but possessed of a noble lineage that no oppression could erase. Like Rome, we conquered. Like Rome, we stamped our name into history like a coin being struck by a press. And like Rome, long after we’re gone, barbarians will connive to bear the title of President of the United States. We lack only the crisis and man on horseback to fully realize an imperial destiny, and perhaps a fully-formed religious vision, but that’s a different discussion. I know it’s a bold claim, but if not us, then what? What axis apart from us is there for the West to revolve in the emerging multipolar order? And no, El Salvador is too small.

He needs a bigger country. Napoleon would have made him Prince of New Grenada.

It’s fine and true to speak of America’s Western heritage, our European culture. But while we must remember where we came from, we must also recognize that America is a great world civilization in its own right. We’re all someone’s son, but there comes a time when we become men, or should. America’s energy is frightening. People I admire did their best not to think about it- Lewis and Tolkien had nothing but contempt for the US; Evola hated America. But it is my firm belief that the dynamism of my country is the still the hurtling comet that represents the power of the West.

"The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, 'I think, therefore I am': Americans do not think, yet they are. The American 'mind', puerile and primitive, lacks characteristic form and is therefore open to every kind of standardization".

I like you, sir, but you’re from the Mexico of Europe. Not even Spain is the Mexico of Europe.

Canada is only Canada because it came from England, which is good, but it will cease being Canada if it keeps being England, which is not so good. A tipping point is being reached where the question is not going to be whether Trump will violate Syrupean sovereignty by threatening Alberta but whether he’ll preserve it by rescuing it from a rapacious China. And this is what Canadian and European public misunderstands about Trump. His bluster is meant to warn. If he has no respect for you, neither does Russia, China, India, heck- probably Indonesia at this point. If he boasts that he can grab Greenland any time he wants, and you know that the only thing you can do in response is embargo IKEA exports, you’ve already lost, and he wants you to know you’ve lost so you’ll stop losing.

And yes, I know IKEA is Swedish, not Danish, but I’m American and I don’t care.

MAGA in its crude American way wants you all to wake up and become what the hour demands. MAGA represents the repudiation of conservatism on the part of the ruling party of the most powerful nation on Earth. Making America great again will be impossible to confine to America. You can dismiss it as lowbrow, or slop, or whatever helps the cope, but new kings, a revival of tradition, tons of babies- it starts with recognizing the need. It’s not time for continuity, but resurrection. If Trump’s public statements make it hard for you foreign rightists to accomplish this goal because he scares the hoes, the problem isn’t Trump. It’s that you’re ruled by hoes, or have become them. Revere what made you what you are. Become what you were meant to be.

You must watch this in its entirety. If you don’t believe John Mikl Thor should be King of Canada and Lord of the Frozen Wastes, Protector of Punjab-on-the-Thames, then there’s no helping you.