Seeing the USA........Canada. The Colonial Curse. Part IV

Canada.  The Colonial Curse. Part IV

Seeing the U.S.A.

Written by Robin Mathews

One of the most important histories written in the last twenty-five years by a Canadian (or anyone else) is surely The American Empire and the Fourth World (McGill-Queen’s, 2003) by Anthony Hall.  Reading it a second time, I marveled that it has been allowed to pass almost unnoticed in Canada, as has its sequel Earth Into Property (McGill-Queen’s, 2010).  The Independent of London described Earth Into Property as one of the most important books of the year (but not, apparently, in Canada).

Canadians might puzzle at the oversight, though they need not.  For Hall’s work, by accident,  brings into evidence ..

(a) Canada’s frightened colonialism..

 (b) our sold-out media and fiercely colonial-minded CBC..

 (c) and the almost total abdication by Canada’s professional historians of what should be a rich and natural focus for them: the North America that Canada inhabits.

When a Canadian writer brilliantly and critically engages the deepest and most disturbing aspects of that subject, a large number of historians in Canada fall into surly, condemning silence – not from a lack of intelligence but as a result of their bottomless colonial indoctrination.

The refusal to recognize Anthony Hall’s work especially describes the refusal of Canada’s public thinkers and commentators to face what is the overwhelming censorship faced by any truly critical expression revealing Canada’s profound colonial-mindedness, its slavish adoration of U.S. behaviour, and its refusal to weigh (as Anthony Hall insistently does weigh) the Canadian and global significance of a powerful country (the USA) founded on lies, built on lies, and conducting maniac foreign policy based on lies and the “exceptionalist” theory that whatever the USA does in the world is good – even while it pillages the world’s wealth, erases the records of great civilizations, and leaves millions of innocent people dead or diseased and desperate – lost in a wasteland of (almost] meaningless carnage.

To begin … the very origin of the USA is lied about in a massive falsification of history. 

       The Truth of U.S. Beginnings

Growing rich from the forced labour of driven Black slaves, the (U.S.) colonial white population was also rapaciously killing or “removing” the owners of the land – the American Indians.

In 1763, by Royal Proclamation, all white occupants of North America were ordered to treat the native people fairly and to set off a large “Indian Country’ for that people to use.  To police the humanitarian edict, the settling white population was called upon to contribute to the cost of introducing law and order. 

Enraged, the settlers screamed against “imposed” taxation and the order to act fairly and humanely towards the ‘First Nations’ of the land.  The white population was not rejecting “taxation without representation” (a famous U.S. lie).  It was rejecting the rule of law in (what was to become) the USA.  Their insistence upon the ‘right’ to act brutally and criminally outside humane behaviour and law has marked U.S. history always.

To uphold their denial of the rule of law, the (U.S.) colonists had to throw off British government.  And so the ruling class of the (U.S.) colonies conducted a War for Independence (not a Revolution).  Normally a revolution is fought to remove an oppressing class from power in order to provide greater freedom and justice to another, more numerous class that is oppressed and that takes over the levers of power.

           A U.S. Revolution??

In the case of the (U.S.) colonies – instead, the lawless, bandit, dominant class fought to be free of the governing class of England that sought fairness for the native population and the introduction of the rule of law at the frontiers of the expanding white community. 

The great “freedom” document of the U.S.A. (1776) is called The Declaration of Independence, written mostly by Thomas Jefferson.  Like George Washington, first president of the U.S.A., Jefferson was a slave owner.  The two men didn’t own a few slaves to do household work and work in their large gardens.  Between the two, they owned hundreds of slaves. 

Samuel Johnson (1708-1784), famous English personality, poet, essayist, biographer, and dictionary maker, couldn’t help asking in 1775: “How is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

And so the noble phrases of The Declaration of Independence ring with falsehood, with intention to mislead … with lies.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident”, Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal”.  He goes on to point to the “inalienable right” of all men to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. 

Jefferson did not go on to write: “We, of course, except black men (and women and children) who we will continue to enslave, mistreat violently, and oppress for our profit for almost another hundred years”.  Nor did he write: “And we also except the native people of the land against whom we will conduct a War of Extermination until we possess all the land that is theirs.”

Indeed, to make sure his readers would not be in doubt, Jefferson described the native people of the land as “merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions”.  To add spice to his calumny, Jefferson accused King George the Third of wanting, in so many words, to set those merciless Indian Savages against the peace-loving white settlers on the land.

             Lying As Continuing Policy

No lie was too great at the beginning of the USA, and no lie has been too great since then.  That is what “American Exceptionalism” means. The U.S. has gone on finding merciless Savages to erase – as it gathers wealth and power all over the world: in Viet Nam, Honduras, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Greece, Iran, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Syria … to name only a few of the places.  Wherever the U.S. wants unchallenged power, it names the people or their leaders “merciless Savages”.

The Iraq War and the Viet Nam War – both celebrated as built upon deliberately false information – are only two U.S. wars where the flagrant lies used as a pretext to go to war have been globally exposed.

All through the nineteenth century Britain controlled the seas … and so the U.S. could not “take” Canada.  At almost every Canadian/U.S. diplomatic meeting, however, U.S. representatives urged Canadians to throw off what U.S. officials chose to see as the repressive and abusive British monarchy (which meant to throw off, also, the protection of the Royal Navy).  Canada refused.

And so a long, long propaganda war has been conducted to teach Canadians to be U.S. colonials, to force Canadians to accept U.S. lies as truth, and to condition Canadians to believe it is “natural” they should assist the USA in its rape and pillage of the planet. That long, long war has gone on and on to make Canada a tool of U.S. greed and exploitation.

As I write, the Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government of Canada is being wooed to accept a government (in fact) superior to the Canadian government, made up of representatives of foreign (largely U.S./U.S. connected) private corporations and the sleaze workers for The One Per Cent across the world.  That new Super Government is intended to rule that foreign enterprises may sue Canada for untold billions of dollars under claims that Canada has done almost anything to deny or weaken profit made from the activity of those foreign corporations in Canada. In that process Canadians would have no say and Canadian government would be stripped of power to intervene.

The new system already at work in NAFTA –
(The North American Free Trade Agreement) - is an unbelievable, con-man, high-level racketeering refinement of the lying-basis for U.S. foreign policy and corporate activity - begun with the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of transported Blacks and the military erasure of the native people of the USA.  It is criminality raised to a sophisticated level at which top lawyers and investment firms make crime appear to be the smooth, rational, normal conduct of the economic system.

Why is the Canadian government even considering such a “treaty”?  We know the Opposition Conservative neo-liberal/neo-fascist forces join with their henchmen media clones to spur on the dictatorship of the criminal class.  The New Democratic Party presently can’t seem to find its name-tag (and so doesn’t know who it is) in order to act in any visible, powerful, consistent way.

For the Liberals there is no excuse for acting against the interests of Canadians.  Why then are they seeming to move to ratification of an oppressive treaty that can only wreak havoc on Canadian society and the lives of Canadians?

The Canadian people see the failure of the Liberal government in Ottawa.  They are beginning to mobilize: Leadnow, Shit Harper Did, The Council of Canadians …. and more. Canadians are going to have to make the Liberal government know it will pay and pay and pay if it sells out to the forces shaping the TPP.  The Liberal government, as well, must end the NAFTA treaty … and all other criminal agreements stealing Canadian independent sovereignty.  The dirty game of well-disguised criminals erasing Canadian sovereignty has to be exposed and stopped in its tracks.

If the Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau won’t stop it, then Canadians must destroy that Liberal government ... as soon as possible … in order to put in power Canadians who will fight for other Canadians … and Canada.

 Written by Robin Mathews


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