Here is another one of those general e-mails making the rounds on the Internet. I suppose it would be similar to those billboards or single page printed sheets posted around Paris on the eave of the revolution in 1789 to inflame and incite harsh views among the people. Means have changed but not methods and goals.

Wilfrid Laurier ideas on Immigrants and being a Canadian in 1907.

‘In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes a Canadian and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin..
But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet a Canadian, and nothing but a Canadian…
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is a Canadian, but something else also, isn’t a Canadian at all. We have room for but one flag, the Canadian flag…
And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the Canadian people.’

Wilfrid Laurier 1907

Every Canadian citizen needs to read this!

KEEP THIS MOVING

Wow, isn’t this an example of old thinking and how far we have perhaps come since Laurier? But I kind of doubt it. Laurier probably wouldn’t have liked me. He was around in 1907 and missed the next hundred years of epic nationalistic slaughter so I won’t hold his ideas against him, he was caught up in the moment of his history and I am sure if he had lasted the next century he would recant every last word.

Nothing has killed more people, done more damage to economies and inflicted more harm than nationalism and modern mercantilism. Before nation states wars were small, the common man largely left out of it and rare as wars are expensive and real soldiers few. 

As soon as nations were created (beginning in 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia) and effective taxation of a population counted by a national census, arms buildups, professional armies and conscription became the order of the day (thank you, Napoleon, Pitt, Disraeli and Bismarck). 

Since the 1750’s the costs of modern warfare has escalated exponentially due to all the technological advances in large scale killing from one generation to the next. Ever bigger armies equipped with the latest weapons were required to keep up. Nationalistic war had become so expensive that no war since has been paid off. Not one. Income tax was created to pay off WW1, didn’t happen. We were told by General Smedley Butler that WW1was nothing more than a money grab led by national governments controlled by big business. 

Nationalism led to the starvation of some 15 million Ukrainians and the execution by labour camp of another five million by Stalin, a bandit named Mussolini in Italy with whom other nations still traded as he raped Ethiopia for national aggrandisement and, of course, nationalism brought us Adolph, his final solution at Auschwitz, Berkenau, Sobibor and a host of other places of sorrow . 

We got WW2 as the answer to national problems of global depression and the nations of Italy, Germany and Japan. And that war has never been intended to be paid off, it simply couldn’t be. And the price paid by the victors made then equally as poor as the losers.

The military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us of in his 1961 final address as President of the US, has taken complete control of the US and so the global economy. The Cold War was nothing less than an economic war of modern mercantilist nation states where the US borrowed from everyone in order to fend off the Soviets who could not borrow from anyone. Uncomprehendingly foreign people in far flung lesser developed lands starved, became poorer and died in useless proxy wars pushed by these nation states in their competition for global supremacy. With the West eventually ‘winning’ the Cold War against the Communist East, we expected the old military funding to evaporate and that money to come back to the people. Never happened.

Nations have gone out of their way to look for new enemies in order to sustain themselves, after all if there are no enemies national borders have no purpose. With the communist ‘enemy’ gone, ten years of relative international peace of the New World Order, along with an increased value of the supranational United Nations, threatened the existence of nationality as a whole. Conservative extremists, particularly in the US and Britain, saw this new era as a threat to their place in the world where each nation regardless of status and power had an equal vote. China, too, come lately to the modern international stage was not interested in lessing its nationalistic power either.

Largely through lack of fiscal, military and political support, enormous efforts were undertaken to denigrate and vilify the UN as a failure with some even suggesting it should be abandoned altogether. A new path to heightened ultranationalism sprang up and found credence on 9/11 as another enemy was found and the war on ‘terror’ came at just the right time. Costly wars of invasion of other nations led to another global depression in 2008. The poor of the world, when the planet has never been wealthier, more technically and medicinally advanced, continue to die of starvation, disease and nationalistic wars.

The poor in the US have never gotten their American Dream. At 4.5 billion dollars, one Nimitz class aircraft carrier in the US navy has cost the children of the US, every last one of them, a free education up to and including their first degree at University. The US has ten of these vessels at present. 

In Canada, Prime Minister Harper wants to spend billions on military equipment to take a more active military role in the world and to show nationalistic strength in our north when we have original, real Canadians starving on their reserves, displaced and disgraced by MacDonald and Laurier et al and ‘other’ Canadian citizens who refuse to live up to the bargains they signed before Confederation. I’d rather be their ‘real’ kind of Canadian than Laurier’s ‘our’ kind of Canadian.

The world is ethically and morally bankrupt, let alone economically, and nationalism, plus the people who fervently promote it, has much to atone for. The happily and subliminally indoctrinated lower and middle class have paid in dollars and blood for much of the sadness in this world for near three hundred years all in the name of their nation. What a waste and loss humanity has, and still is, suffering.

I have always preferred to be a citizen of the world, all are my brothers and sisters, and my fear is that nationalism will yet bring us to another cataclysmic conflict, if religion doesn’t get us there first. I don’t like assimilation, indoctrination, marginalisation as they all lead to “us” versus “them”. This kind of thinking we learned, hopefully, from Hitler is counter productive, eventually even self destructive. So, no, I don’t want to be called a “Canadian” as suggested by Laurier, my loyalty is to all humanity and not to a self serving corner of it.