The imperial history of the United States, for dumbguys

If the Left are decadent, degenerate, and demonic, the Right are dumbguys. Even the alleged intellectuals of the Right -- and I could name names -- are mediocrities and worse, average and conventional, ignorant and unlearning, and wrong at least as often as right. The intellectual and cultural degradation of the Right in America today is in its way as destructive as the satanic Left.  

 

When the Right are right, they're right instinctually, like an animal, and when they're wrong there's no saving them, like an animal whose instincts compel it to dash out into the road before an onrushing truck. 

Among the ugly ignorance of the intellectual poseurs of the Right today is the thesis that America is founded in war against imperialism, as though the Americans of the 1770s had grown up out of the ground in Massachusetts or Virginia, then some faraway foreign king presumed to yoke them in service to the riches and glory of his alien empire, so they fought and won a war to cast off his wicked imperialism -- hoo boy.  

The fact of history is that we were the imperialists, the empire was us: Americans were colonists. And "The British" weren't some foreign occupying power: we were at least as British as the British. Our Revolutionary War was as the English Civil War in the century prior, war of the people against the Crown. 

The fact of history is that there is an America at all because for our fledgling first century and a half our mother country had the imperial power and reach to defend and sustain an Anglo-Saxon civilization in the wilderness of the New World. And after the founding of the republic we carried on colonizing, and colonized more territory in the name of the republic than in the time of the empire. 

Every man and his dog today would judge that America has been imperialist at least since 1945 and especially since 1990. But America has been imperialist from the first and all along. What is the settlement of more than half the continental United States with the attendant, innumerable Indian wars, if not imperialism?

  

What is the Monroe Doctrine, if not imperialism? For two centuries it has been the settled foreign policy of the United States, and it insists on an American monopoly of dominion over the whole of the Western Hemisphere: are we to conceive of that as some pristine Early Republic republicanism, and not the most grandiose imperialism?   

What are the Mexican-American War and Spanish-American War and the annexation of Texas, if not imperialism? What are Liberia, Alaska and Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam, even Cuba before communism, if not imperialism? What are the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone, if not imperialism? 

 

American Civilization reaches back now just over four centuries, and in that time America has never not been objectively imperialist. America has been imperialist from the first and all along. That there even is an America, is the product of imperialism. 

Empire is neither bad nor good, empire is a fact. Some empires do more help than hurt, and some more hurt than help, and generally empires are like the individuals who build and keep them, there's good in them and bad both. There've been empires since there've been societies with any organization to speak of. And empire is like war, it will be with us always. To declare against imperialism itself, or war itself, is about as sensible as declaring against the rising and setting of the sun or the turning of the seasons. 

Thrashing and flailing and raging

Trump's trouble is he expects Russia to quit winning our war against them in trade for nothing that they're fighting for.

If in later 1864, by which time the Union was winning the American Civil War to restore the union and abolish slavery, Russia had demanded that we quit winning the war, and offered that if we did then they'd think about selling us Alaska, we'd have answered, "Thanks for thinking of us, and we might find some use for Alaska if you're minded to sell, but we're fighting this war to restore the union and abolish slavery, and we're winning, so unless you can trade us our quitting the war for what we're fighting it for, then we'll carry on fighting and winning, thanks."  

 

And so to Trump: Quit shrieking at them already and listen to them for once, remember your campaign promises and honor your mandate, while you may yet save yourself and your people, the country and the world. You haven't the time for distraction, you haven't the luxury for error, you haven't the margin for betrayal.

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Since December of 2015 I've never not supported Donald J. Trump, and that support for what little it's worth has been greatest when Trump has been lowest -- until today.  

 

It was but months ago that Trump told us God had saved his life so that he might save the world from nuclear war; today Trump tells us he's "prepared" for nuclear war against Russia, the white Christian country who caused us no harm and posed us no threat, and the world's foremost nuclear power.  

 

And that is but the latest in months now of betrayals, betrayals of Trump's principles and promises, his election and mandate, his voters and believers, and me.

 

Thrashing and flailing and raging. That's the picture of Trump half a year into his second presidency. Trump is not the man he was only last November on Election Day. No more the happy warrior, no more the fun and funny amateur and outsider; no more the champion of the Forgotten Man, no more the enemy of the enemies of the people; no more the un-politician, the one man in politics who may be trusted to do as he tells us he'll do and never to betray us; no more the one president in a generation to decline to go to war.

Trump today is a blunderbuss exploding noisily in all directions, as much against friend or neutral as enemy. He's a brute beast, unthinking and never learning. Forever shrilling, never listening. Equal parts ignorant and arrogant. Changeable as a weather vane in a tempest, impressionable as a fat man's seat cushion, unreliable as a treaty with France. Threats and insults, insults and threats. Hysterical insecurity, bombastic bravado, sputtering impotence. An egotist and a fabulist. A clown and a child. 

I'm no prophet and this is no prophecy, it's no more than a sense, but Trump today looks to me like King Kong about the time he scales the Empire State Building. It's in the Bible, it's in Antiquity, it's in the movies. Unless he recognizes he's a mortal man and discovers a Christian modesty and humility and decency, and unless he remembers himself and his mandate from the people, Trump must sooner or later climb that Empire State Building like King Kong, where those fighter planes must shoot him up and knock him down, tumbling from the tower onto the street in a splatter.

The truth about Canada, for Americans at last waking from their happy delusions on the question

Canada is Ontario. Canada was contrived around Ontario and for Ontario. The very name of Canada is the former name for Ontario, and the Canadian symbol of the maple leaf is the symbol for Ontario. And Ontario is The Enemy in the Revolution. The Tories, who lost the war and left the country. Ontario is those Americans who chose the crown over the people. Ontario and thus Canada are America-hating Americans.  

The object of Canada is and was from the first the countering of the United States on the North American continent. Canada is a minor moon in an American solar system, but the Canadian identity is oppositional, set in opposition to America, and gainsaying: Canada is whatever it is that America is not, in any given age; it is contingent and changeable, and devoid of immovable principle.

There is no God in Canada and thus there is no Right in Canada. And no hope. The only way for those godly people who are subjects of godless Canada, is out.

Annex Alberta

If Trump is not in earnest as to annexing some part of Canada to the United States then he ought to be, and if he is in earnest then the time is now and the way is Alberta. 

Canada always was an accident of history and a historical mistake; it's a make-believe country; it's been underwritten by first Britain and later America and would never have stood on its own; it always was antidemocratic and anymore it's satanic; and after Trudeau I and Trudeau II Canada never was so wrecked in a century and a half since Confederation than it is just now. In the grandest scheme, if British North America will not be British then ultimately it can only be American. Pere Trudeau half a century ago banished Britishness from Canada, then more recently Junior Trudeau abolished whatever it was his father had made of Canada, so that by now there's nothing left hanging it all together. And the only hope for the people of Canada is its disintegration, and their integration into America. The only way is out. 

Not Quebec. Never Quebec. New France must never be permitted admission to the United States; it is antithetical to America, and anyhow the prospect of any generation of Frenchmen affirmatively voting for U.S. statehood is blessedly unthinkable. It may be also that Ontario would be loath to join America, being as they are "Canada" proper, namely the Tories who lost the argument and the war in the American Revolution, then appropriated the leftover imperial possessions for their pathetic counter to the American project. Ontario and Quebec before 1867 formed the Province of Upper and Lower Canada, and they might conceivably be reconstituted into that Rump Canada.    

The 51st state can only be Alberta. It's the low-hanging fruit, begging pardon for the cliche. Alberta is effectively an American state trapped in a Canadian purgatory, and the cash-cow milked by Ottawa: Alberta might be expected to vote for secession from Canada and accession to the United States, in which case it might be absorbed into America very neatly. At which point the precedent would be established, and Canada may well go broke and fly apart. And thereafter the United States would be in position to pick off the debris, in the West and the Maritimes. 

As to the three provinces of the Maritimes and the two Prairie provinces east of Alberta, it may be that their populations and economies are too insignificant to warrant admission to the United States as states unto themselves. But the Maritime provinces were at one time all of them Nova Scotia, and they might be consolidated into a unitary U.S. state, called maybe The Maritimes, with the three constituent provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island being retained as regions. New Brunswick shares a long border with the United States, then Nova Scotia is connected contiguously by the isthmus, and PEI today is joined to the mainland by bridge. The new state capital could only be Halifax, which might make also a major American port on the North Atlantic and Arctic trade routes and a major American naval base, the ideal harbor jutting out well into the North Atlantic.

 

The Prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan are vast territories with modest populations of something over a million each, and for that same reason of population and economy they also may want consolidating into a unitary state of two regions for admission to the United States, called maybe The Prairies or "Manewan". British Columbia may be another matter, for reasons of size and of politics, but in the event that Alberta joined the Union, BC would be enveloped on three sides by the United States, and already half its coast is Alaskan, then in the event that Saskatchewan and Manitoba followed Alberta into the Greater United States, BC would be far removed from Rump Canada.  

 

Yukon which borders Alaska and the whole or part of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut might be annexed and administered as territories of the United States, called maybe the United States Arctic Territories or USAT (you-sat). As to Newfoundland and Labrador, Labrador which is a northern extension of Quebec and Newfoundland which is quite independent of the Maritimes, and the whole of which may be too tiny in the way of population and economy to warrant admission to the United States as a state unto itself, I've not yet decided what's to be done with them.