Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Trump: "It's called presidential harassment and it is unfortunate."
It's hard to argue against the idea that Trump is a Democrat plant. Still, it's not a feather in the cap of Republicans that so many of them are so quick to support a guy who makes a point of saying the most hateful things he can think of.
Venezuela is undemocratic? So where is the U.S. rage at Saudi Arabia?
The part about Naziism is something I came to reluctantly. And it didn't start with Naziism.
The concept of patriotism has been used for centuries - loyalty to the monarch, etc. The British empire exploited that to draw the support of a British working class that, itself, got nothing out of the empire. The notion of patriotism simply made those people killer-servants of the rich. Thus the lavishing of medals.
World War 1 had nothing to do with Canada. Nor were the soldiers on the other side any more evil than the ones on our side. But tens of thousands of Canadians died in it. The only justification for our involvement was loyalty to the king - which was a bloody poor excuse for those deaths. (Britain, of course, would not have done the same for Canada. We desperately needed British support in the Alasaka Boundary dispute of 1904. But the British dumped us.
The behaviour of world leaders was profoundly affected by Hitler and Mussolini who brought form to a self interest and greed that had always been there. it had a manufactured enemy - the Jews/ We would later have the Koreans, the Afghans and now the Latins.
In the case of Venezuela, our news media have been obsessed with the evils of the Venezuelan government. They are evil? Compared to whom? The Americans who starve chldren to death in Yemen, who have slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Latin America. who are now attempting to steal Venezuela's oil fields to be given to American billionaires?
That is, in fact, the meaning of our patriotism. Our leaders and our news media are manipulating us exactly as Hitler manipulated Germans.
All issues are issues of 'patriotism". Many leaders - like Trump and the Bushes - come to power by inventing an enemy.
....and then there are the wimps like Trudeau....
I very much fear we have recreated the world of the 1930s - and we are on the edge of horrors that even Hitler never thought of.