or, The Exciting Frontiers of Collapse in Contrasting the IRA and the FLQ.
(5,617 words.)
Will this be the one that finally gets me stripped naked and thrown into the Moid Cuber? Perhaps so. Even you, intrepid content slave, must play your cards carefully reading this. As a sensible preamble, I am going to state clearly for the record what readers should take away from this piece.
The following is a list of things you should NOT do:
- Commit terrorism against government buildings.
- Wage an unceasing sectarian conflict against the state.
- Train with Jordanians.
Conversely, the following is a list of things you SHOULD do:
- Tip your Mother.
- Sexualize Normalizing.
- Time crime.
You wouldn’t arrest a meme, would you?
Separatist movements present in a variety of forms and assume a spectrum of tactics dependent on their level of commitment. Some movements are purely rhetorical while others plot violent resistance against perceived oppressors. At the outset it would be germane to sketch the shape of what we mean when we refer to “nationalism.”
On this very publication we have discussed the history of nationalism, and in our political realm much interest is committed to defining the nation along ethnic lines and thereby tracing the roots into ancient epochs beyond political science. From our modern vantage point we can identify the prototype of nationalism even though our ancestors would not have a grasp of such a concept as we do. They would most certainly have a shared identity, but more localized than collectivized. We presently contextualize everything in a global ecosystem of warring paradigms and mass conflict where even the disconnected individual is drafted.
For our present purposes I think it’s necessary to identify the development of self-awareness moreso than the presence of self-awareness, as it’s obvious that nationalist movements in the modern era take a different approach than their progenitors. According to Jürgen Osterhammel, the pivot point where group identities could collectivize into rivals of power was the 19th century, and the gradual spread of nationalistic sentiments facilitated by technological communication networks, globalization, and electrifying examples of successful political rebellions.
In the nineteenth century it became possible for the first time to conceptualize an international politics that subordinated dynastic considerations, one that presupposed that the normal unit of political and military action was not a ruler’s arbitrary patrimonium but a state structure that defines and defends its own borders. Taken to its natural conclusion, power was wielded by a matrix of institutions not reliant on any particular leadership personnel.
It was the brutal end of the Ancien Régime as the floor dropped out of its legitimacy. The occasion was marked by the inauguration of the nation-state, a seismic reconfiguration of power spreading unevenly around the world. Kings and emperors across the planet transitioned to being figureheads rather than the essential head of the body of civilization.
While a nation fundamentally relies on a people possessing a sufficient comprehension of themselves apart from the sum of humanity, it’s undeniable that the fidelity of such a comprehension is vastly different in the fifteenth century contrasted against the nineteenth century. We can trace the technical definition of a nation back to the European middle ages and beyond – tribes can also fit within this model – but we can more narrowly identify a mass awareness and a populist empowering of this implicit association much more recently.
Nationalism as we know it is new, and it continues to refine itself.
“It was the era in which nationalism emerged as a way of thinking and a political mythology, finding expression in doctrines and programs, and mobilizing sentiments with a capacity to arouse the masses. From the outset nationalism had had a strongly anti-imperial component. It was the experience of French “foreign rule” under Napoleon that first radicalized nationalism in Germany, and everywhere else—in the Tsarist Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, and Ireland—resistance stirred in the name of new national conceptions.” – Jürgen Osterhammel, “The Transformation of the World”
What differentiates a nation from an empire, especially in a historical period where the greatest empires have assumed a secular humanist form? According to Osterhammel, a nation-state proclaims its own homogeneity and indivisibility, usually finding itself surrounded by other nation-states with a similar structure and clearly defined boundaries. Cultural affinities such as language, religion and shared history are immersive to the whole population.
An empire, on the other hand, has less clearly defined external boundaries where it typically encounters “wilderness” or “barbarians,” meaning a much more existentially oppositional relationship to the other that never turns inward. It is for this reason that nations typically exist within empires, achieving self-awareness against a state apparatus rather than proximity to a vast dark forest. You can find elements of what constitute a nation within the empire structure, among the elites and aristocrats. Here you can see it as something of a nation-as-class.
A nation’s awareness therefore sharpens within the shadow of power. Thus an empire, destined for multiculturalism as it expands its boundaries and integrates new peripheries, becomes an uncontrollable engine for generating nationalisms.
Most nations expend their various energies striving for existence, and it is through this struggle they are given form. The following is an investigation of two revolutionary separatist movements gathered around ethnic concerns that reached critical mass in the 20th century. In fact, they both cite the same oppressor: The English. We are referring to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). The former, despite its current fallen state, is internationally recognized as a pioneer of guerilla warfare and an illuminating case study in how to conduct a prolonged sectarian conflict against an overwhelming force. The latter is decidedly less focused and respected, so let us investigate why.
Ireland at the dawn of the twentieth century was approaching one hundred years of official political affiliation with Great Britain under terms of the Act of Union of 1801. That act established a unified parliamentary system and cemented political, economic, and religious ties between the two countries, with Britain assuming the dominant position. According to historian J.B.E. Hittle, Ireland prior to this had been governed for five hundred years by an independent Irish Parliament that nonetheless met at the command of an English king.
This unidirectional relationship maintained a reverberating oppositional sentiment among the Irish people who carried blood memories of Viking conquest and Norman invasions. This resentment compounded under the drooping eye of the great lion.
The Great Famine is the watershed event in modern Irish history and largely attributed to decisions made in a foreign parliament. While early as 1845 the Peel government recognized the potato blight as a looming catastrophe, local relief administrators botched the effort leading to a mass starvation that claimed the lives of over one million Irish and triggered the mass exodus of over a million more.
At the most foundational level, not just in the academies and salons but throughout the fields and villages, the longstanding yearning for rebellion was churning.
Prior to the formation of The IRA and its political representation of Sinn Féin, there were similar separatist movements such as the United Irishmen Party of the 1790s and the Fenians of 1858, the latter even attempting an ill-fated invasion of Canada.
At that time, Sinn Fein was the rallying standard for anti-British sentiment across the country and they were making great strides in proposing a practical alternative to imperial rule. They organized demonstrations, established banks, courts, and other institutions of civil administration, in effect setting up a parallel society in many counties throughout Ireland.
In all revolutions there is invariably some event or series of events that serves as a catalyst to move people from ideas to action or shift from political agitation into armed conflict. These two steps are typical as any prolonged revolt of sufficient scale requires an intellectual core to unite the people, and then a rhetorical justification to put those lives on the line. In America, it was enactment of an unpopular colonial tax policy serving as the flashpoint to armed confrontation. In Ireland, it was Lloyd George’s proposal in the spring of 1918 to introduce military conscription into Ireland, followed shortly thereafter by a subversive British intelligence assessment known as the German Plot that led to the sweeping incarceration of Sinn Féin leadership.
“The year 1920 has been referred to as “The Year of Terror” in Ireland. Ambushes of police constables escalated and IRA attacks on RIC barracks commenced. De Valera’s call for a boycott of British institutions, and the corresponding establishment of Sinn Fein shadow governments in almost every county, were rapidly eroding Crown authority and demonstrating Irish resolve to the world. Across Ireland, taxes went unpaid. Juries increasingly could not be impaneled, and if they were, Sinn Fein and IRA suspects were acquitted. The Dail established Republican courts to settle civil disputes and set up its own income tax and banking system. The IRA formed a police force to settle civil disputes and enforce law and order in towns and districts abandoned by the RIC. It is significant that while the IRA had gone on a full war footing in January 1919, the British had not.” – J.B.E. Hittle, “Michael Collins and the Anglo-Irish War: Britain’s Counterinsurgency Failure”
No rebellion, as populist as it may claim to be, is possible without its great men, and history will assess the effectiveness of a movement against the quality of its enigmatic figures. For the IRA in the early decades of the 20th century it was Michael Collins, oft cited as the first urban terrorist and an architect of modern guerrilla warfare. Although he remains a national hero to many, Collins is also remembered for masterminding bold prison breakouts, daring raids on police stations, and bicycling around town in a pinstripe suit.
As chief of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Director of Intelligence for the revolutionary Irish Parliament (among other titles,) Collins had the power to launch an insurgent strategy never before attempted in Ireland: an intelligence-driven guerrilla war that would tax the resources of the British government to the limit. The network of spies pulled together by Collins stood as a direct rival to the mirror network of informants that had kneecapped previous separatist movements. The war for the hearts and minds of the Irish people was an important dimension to the larger conflict, a battle that the Republicans won. At least for a time.
While the leader of Sinn Féin Eamon de Valera first conceived the strategy of ostracizing local British officials, it was Collins who upped the ante with direct attacks against the government police and soldiers. Sinn Féin and the IRA would lock horns at various points over the necessity of armed resistance and what the terms of victory ought to be, with the political party favoring a peace treaty while the insurrection movement favoring total retreat of all British forces.
Despite the IRA disintegrating due to internal conflict and Sinn Fein becoming a Leftist Girlboss Abortionpalooza, the movement demonstrated that, even when the insurgents are asymetrically armed, they can sustain a modern separatist insurrection so long as they are disciplined and their intelligence is adequate. Their strength was drawn from their fluid military strategy, but more than anything it was the deep pool of localized human capital that they could wield as offensive or defensive power.
While populism – understood as a bottom-up projection of political will upon the state – is correctly critiqued in these heterodox spaces, it is an undeniable component of more dynamic political movements serving pure pragmatism, one that is ignored at our peril.
No better example of this organic opposition can be found than South Armagh, situated at the border between Southern and Northern Ireland. Here we find another era of Irish resistance, beginning in the 1970s up until the discombobulations caused by their English bombing campaigns in the 1990s. In South Armagh, road signs warn not of children crossing but of a Sniper at Work, the red triangle framing the silhouette of a masked gunman waving a rifle. According to historian Toby Harnden, it was geography that contributed to the formation of a particularly rebellious people.
For the Irish in this region, hostility towards authority as such was more profound than elsewhere, stretching back to the Middle Ages and modern Republicanism was simply the latest manifestation of its independence and refusal to submit to any rule from a perceived outsider, including those within Ireland. Recruitment to the cause was a multi-generational affair, with many volunteers tracing their familial commitment back to the Defenders and Ribbonmen of the 18th and 19th centuries.
A parallel can be drawn with the Appalachians of the United States of America. Political configurations occasionally come to the harsh realization that these regions resist absorption, instruction.
“But while myth and propaganda had played their part in cementing the notoriety of South Armagh, so too had a terrible reality. Even to Irish nationalists, the area remained ‘neither fish nor flesh’, a borderland where strangers feared to tread. South Armagh’s quarrel was with authority per se rather than just British rule, and even a genuine political accommodation in Northern Ireland appeared unlikely to bring to an end a rebellion that had already lasted centuries.” – Toby Harnden, Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh
The South Armagh Brigade pioneered the use of mortars, Semtex was first used in South Armagh, and radio-controlled bombs were developed there. According to Army records, since the beginning of the Troubles the IRA in this borderland had mounted some 23 helicopter attacks using, among other devilish schemes, rocket propelled grenades and M60 light machine-guns acquired from infamous gun deals with Libya. The logistical requirements to accomplish such feats was further evidence of their permeation into Ireland’s civilizational musculature.
The charismatic leader of this particular zone was a smuggler known as Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, owner of the Slab Murphy farm complex. A bachelor, he lived at the farm with his elderly widowed mother Elizabeth. His terms of victory were even more acutely felt than Michael Collins, who was ultimately worn down and brought to the negotiating table. Murphy fought for nothing less than full retreat of British forces and it would be unceasing violence until such a time. One anecdote tells of Sean O’Callaghan, head of the IRA’s Southern Command at the time, in conversation with Murphy at IRA’s Revolutionary Council in 1983. When he asked “so, how are we going to win the war, Tom?” the reply followed: “we’ll bomb them to the conference table and then booby-trap the table.”
Murphy was like a tulpa conjured by the will of a kinfolk who refused to be controlled. Such grand designs for violence – limited only by access to resources – sowed the seeds of the eventual downfall of the IRA as they took the fight to the heart of England. It was these bombing campaigns rocking the English citizenry that cumulatively lost them the mandate of the people, burdened as they were by the villanization of invaders.
The will of the people isn’t just moralism captured by the scribes of history, it is crucial practicality on the ground, behind the walls, and within the trees. Without the support of the public there so exits resources, protection, and personnel.
The Real IRA further triggered a collapse of public approval by a botched 1998 bombing in the Northern Ireland town of Omagh which killed 29 people. The bomb exploded as dozens of people unknowingly gathered around it, a failure of the Real IRA leadership to provide sufficient warning as was typical of their attacks. In the wave of public outrage that followed, the Real IRA was forced to call a ceasefire and the reputation of the IRA entered a freefall from which it never recovered.
One day you’re deciding to strike at the heart of imperialist power, the next day you’re getting a Cranberries song written about you because you whoopsie-daiseyed too many children.
(Zesty Factoid: on Spotify this banger is placed gently between Linger and Dreams, two of the Gilmore Girlsest lesbian anthems ever released.)
One would assume that as the public acclimates to violence that their tolerance would reflexively increase, but it’s clear there are limits. It may be inevitable that with such a clear and decisive vision of total victory that the defensive position would assume an offensive position, following its own momentum to strike at the heart of the perceived oppressor. Collateral damage by degrees becomes acceptable, while unthinkable acts become thinkable. If a nuclear weapon was in play, on a long enough timeline of normalization what argument could be made against using it for the multi-generational hardened soldiers?
Limitations upon total victory wither in time.
While revolutions are led by remarkable men, without the blood and soil embodied by the people, such movements are doomed to disintegration. This is exhibited by the failure of the Front de libération du Québec which culminated in what is known in Canada as The October Crisis.
The October Crisis was not merely an isolated event that took place from October to December 1970, but rather the climax of revolutionary activities from 1963 to 1973 by at least 50 FLQ members or sympathizers, whose declared aim was to separate Quebec from Canada and form a workers’ state.
A separatist movement that on the surface would appear reminiscent of the IRA, the FLQ was a very different beast in similar but separate circumstances. It was a purportedly ethonationalist independence movement that, after decades of political agitation and advocacy, kidnapped both British trade commissioner James Cross and Quebec Minister of Immigration and Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte.
The operational timeline for the FLQ was short and their escapades scant by comparison, but they fulfill every criteria of a militant separatist movement and deserve to be studied in their cultural context.
According to William Tetley, a Canadian journalist committed to this story’s unfolding at the time, the FLQ began at the end of February 1963 as a separatist movement without any Marxist aspirations. This was reflected by their initial manifestos simply demanding that Quebec achieve full sovereignty from Canadian confederation. It was the later manifesto released in 1970 which, while retaining this goal, further called for a workers’ state and employed the language of a broader anticapitalist revolution. These were the major contributions of Pierre Vallières and Charles Gagnon, two political activists who joined the organization in 1964 who would become the most notorious names affiliated with the movement.
In furtherance of this ideological shift, in 1968 a secret eight-page document entitled “Revolutionary Strategy and the Role of the Avant-Garde,” outlined the FLQ’s long-term strategy of successive waves of robberies, violence, bombings, kidnappings, and selective assassinations, culminating in class-oriented revolution. Like Michael Collins, the goal of Vallières especially was to leverage increasing waves of violence to repel the province from the established English order. Unlike Collins, Vallières saw the victory condition as much more complex. Quebec would only be truly free if all existing power structures were toppled, capitalism abolished, and the classless proletariat triumphant.
Seeing themselves as heroic figures in the mold of Che Guevara, the FLQ chose to train in Algeria and Jordan and in the forests of Mont Tremblant Park, Saint-Boniface-de-Shawinigan, and Lac Saint-Jean. In their minds the public were not fully aligned with their mission, so they had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the fulfillment of the People’s Revolt, at which point they would surely be celebrated as liberators.
“Just as an insurrection can be achieved by a relatively small number of people; so can a revolution. One example is Cuba, where Fidel Castro began with a band of 8 men. In 1956 this small group of fighters disembarked from a yacht in Oriente province and, within a month, had been reduced to twelve. Nevertheless, Castro managed to fight off 30,000 troops loyal to President Fulgencio Batista and trained by the Americans, and by 1958 he had 1,000 men and 7,000 clandestine urban guerrillas, a force with which he was soon to mount a revolution that succeeded in overthrowing the government.” – William Tetley, October Crisis, 1970: An Insider’s View
The acute movement was able to inspire many students and win over union leadership, but it failed to ignite the passions of the very workers whose collective identity they appropriated. Most importantly, they had the tacit support of the political class. The Parti Quebecois leadership wanted a solution to the ballooning calamity of firebombings and robberies, but one on their terms clean of the federal government’s fingerprints. Although officially opposing violence, they were also reluctant to criticize the FLQ because they overall shared their goal of Quebec separation. The Parti also sought the youth vote and was reluctant to curb the students who were demonstrating in the movement’s favor.
The political dimension to separation was already in place and merely tolerant of the FLQ as long as it served their interests.
Prime Minister Trudeau understood that the FLQ’s aim was to establish a parallel power, similar to the IRA but defined along Communist lines, and so invoked on the 4th of October 1970 the War Measures Act. This move was controversial as the act could only be used in only three circumstances: war, insurrection, or apprehended insurrection. It was “apprehended insurrection” that granted them the legal casus belli, if not the moral one. While the act was replaced with the Emergencies Act in 1988, such a response is still possible as evidenced by the reaction to the Covid-19 Trucker Protest in 2022.
Shortly after the military was summoned in 1970, Pierre Laporte was found murdered by strangulation. The FLQ appeared thunderstruck that such measures would be accepted by the public, and that their organization was so swiftly dismantled. Much of the blame can be placed on the enigmatic figures at the center of the movement; just like the IRA, or indeed any political movement, leadership is a prerequisite to conjure the spirit of the soldiers. Pierre Vallières was not directly responsible for Laporte’s murder, although he was found guilty of killing secretary Thérèse Morin with a bomb delivered to the La Grenade shoe manufacturer in 1966. He spent 4 months in jail for the crime, and after the October Crises he would renounce violence in all its forms, come out as a gay man, and dedicate the rest of his life advocating for LGBT rights.
What of Vallières’ pre-gay writings, those that inspired the actions of those who committed these increasingly scandalous direct actions under his leadership? Thankfully, he penned an autobiography during his brief stay in prison titled “White Niggers of America.” In his own words we can observe the author blur the enemy target towards the international order, and express no small amount of disdain towards his own people.
In the mind of Vallières, to be a “nigger” on the American continent was to be someone’s slave, referring of course to the people of Quebec who he viewed as oppressed not only by American interests but the racism of the White man. Like many Marxists he saw international cooperation as essential to success, but lionized blacks as the revolutionary archetype, proclaiming Black Nationalists as natural allies despite their absence from the Quebec population.
He asserted with vigor that Quebec could not hate “dirty niggers” because they themselves were “dirty niggers.” He was clear to express how the poor Whites who despise the black man are “doubly niggers,” for they are victims of one more form of racist alienation which imprisons them in a net of synthetic hate.
Identification as “double dirty niggers” did not have as wide an audience as he may have presumed.
To his credit, Vallières began with an an ethnic case for separatism. Directing the reader to how his ancestors came to Canada with the hope of beginning a new life as soldiers or day laborers, they fought to carve out a space for themselves within the harsh North American terrain. The others came as “volunteers,” especially under the Talon administration of the mid-1600s, a century before the English conquest. In 1689 there were 10,000 French Canadians in what was then known as New France, a population that originated the term “Canadien.”
It wasn’t long for stratification to occur. The fur trade was monopolized by a few French merchants: “the French of France,” as they were already beginning to be resentfully identified by the French settlers known colloquially as Habitants. A revolt centered around the Speaker for the Legislative assembly of Lower Canada Louis-Joseph Papineau took the English by surprise with his Lower Canada Rebellion. The Habitants, many of whom felt politically dispossessed, were hypnotized by such firebrands and, despite the opposition of the higher clergy, demonstrated with increasing violence their will to overthrow the nouvelles élites.
Quebecois isolation was further entrenched by Premiere Maurice Duplessis who ceded iron deposits of northern Quebec to the Americans in exchange for financial support of his political machinations. This is a recurring story throughout Canadian history, and Anti-Americanism was central to Quebec separatism.
This history of revolt is a leading contributor to the persistent discourse surrounding Quebec separatism, present even now while Irish independence has receded from relevance. Nationalists young and old prioritize Quebec independence, the fire of separatism still alight where the embers barely flicker in civilizationally proximal regions.
“When a ‘great darkness,‘such as characterized the Duplessis regime from 1944 to 1959, extends over a whole people, those who ask themselves questions about man’s destiny are sometimes tempted to despair of others and of themselves. The triumphant reign of Stupidity seems to justify the metaphysics of the Absurd, of individual Anarchy and of Nausea. Before going through its ‘quiet revolution,‘ Quebec went through the dictatorship of Stupidity; and for a long time the Québécois struggled vainly, in anxiety and despair, like penniless prisoners who are totally ignorant of the procedures that cause them to be in prison one day and in court the next, then in prison again, without ever understanding the working of the machine that shifts them back and forth in a universe from which all light, reason, and meaning are shut out, the universe called Justice, Law and Order, the Public Interest.” – Pierre Vallières, White Niggers of America
Vallières took particular aim at who he deemed the parasitic petty bourgeoisie of French Canada and anyone he believed represented colonial imperialism. This included all members of the Catholic faith and, in a rough accounting, the majority of the Quebecois. Like most Marxists, Vallières had contempt for the working class he claimed to champion. He remarked that the destiny of the Québécois people was doomed to slow death, or to prolonged mediocrity. He heaped scorn upon his struggling family who he dismissed as boring, unimaginative. In fact, everyone in Quebec was boring, inspiring him to depart for an extended stay in Paris. He left France when he decided that Parisians was also too boring for him. He returned home with the help of his loathed parents, globetrotting along a tightrope of darkening disillusionment. The entire world failed to live up to his standard, and everyone he met failed to recognize the importance of his translucent ambition. He saw opportunity with the emergence of the FLQ.
The FLQ failed to achieve the mandate of the people because located within its unifying spirit was the cancer what dreamed itself as superhuman. Its incoherent terrorism was not tolerated, its hostile proclamations fell upon deaf ears, and its disregard for the culture of Quebec meant that no increase in violence would snap the masses out of their capitalistic stupor.
A revolt can never replace a government, it can only critique power and endeavor to deconstruct it, perhaps eventually topple it. It works best when it has an enemy to target, never led astray by fashioning soldiers into statesmen in parallel. As we have seen in the examples of the IRA and FLQ along with dozens of other examples, the creation of an alternative governance ecosystem is not only possible but crucial. Can such an ecosystem be swapped into the central power vacuum once obliterated? It seems to depend greatly on what spirit the revolution embodies, and many modern revolutions seem to have no desire to address the concerns of their own people. It’s the worship of pure ideology and an ironic disregard for the very humanity it purports to redeem.
In the final analysis, any war against the oppressor of a people requires said people to have a ferocious concept of self and a vanguard that is willing to fight for their survival. It cannot be a war fought for an ideology as that war will inevitably turn inward, directing its deconstructive pincers towards the people it claims to defend.
Years ago I published an article with the Old Gory Club titled “The Annexation of Canada.” Before this discourse dominated Canadian politics after threats issued by President Trump, the purpose of this article was to envision a scenario where concurrent rebellions of discrete Canadian nationalisms, occasionally taking the form of separatist movements, gather enough territorial will to position decentralized breakaway states that could engage directly with the American government in opposition to the Canadian state. It was gaming out a strategy to create a patchwork sovereignty which would still repel full integration into the American system while addressing the provincial interests which, left unfulfilled, have discombobulated confederation.
As we have seen, using Canada as a staging ground for an international revolution against America will result in failure, but the people as of yet are not ready to support any coordinated assault upon the legitimacy of the federal government. Canadians are too complacent, their identities so pummeled by secular humanist relativism. The same applies to most countries in the Anglosphere regardless of the multitudinous grievances they routinely levy against a government that so routinely persecutes its own people. A system is what it does, and from 10,000 feet it would appear Western governments were fashioned to dispossess its Heritage citizenry.
Canada is a member of the Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association of countries primarily defined by their British colonial history. It would be wrong to say Canada is a commonwealth brokered between its provinces, but it certainly does not function as a nation. It is a country in technical terms, but that is more a description of a robust state apparatus. These categories sound fluid, but it could be argued that Canada’s multicultural and officially multilingual structure positions it as something of a lesser empire: not a homogenous nation by any measure, but a bloated collection of federalized organs of power that measures its success by how it balances the perpetually competing nations within it, nonetheless possessed by a global ambition and desire for reckless growth.
The only homogenous group within its borders is the multiplying managerial class reminiscent of the Aristocratic Nation Class pre-19th century, the only thing keeping the enterprise unified being the monolithic machinery of the state. Like many countries within the Anglosphere, it has become an engine for pressurizing identity groups into new hostile forms reminiscent of the 19th century formations of nations as reactions to imperial excess.
Another article on the Old Glory Club was released earlier this year titled “The Pan-American School of Foreign Policy” which argued strongly for military intervention into Canada, constructed on a Biblical understanding of international law. OGC members frequently enlist the endorsement of God to legitimize their political opinions, so we can move past that.
Written from an American nationalist perspective, it asserted that the Canadian government needed to be cajoled by limited military incursion to reverse course on plainly failing policies such as mass migration and the legalization – indeed, the popularization – of assisted suicide. It identified the perpetrator as the state and would act in the name of the oppressed Canadian people. While I harbor immense distrust towards the American government when it comes to regime change in the purported interest of the oppressed population, such speculative projects inspire a Third Other Thing, a roadmap apart from either total absorption by the American Empire or helpless fantasies of total system collapse.
The Biblical case for militaristic influence is flimsy, but the pragmatic case is imminent. Politically and demographically, America is not much better than Canada. California matches – perhaps exceeds – the progressive scandalizations of Ontario, and their population is at par with the entire country. What America has is money. What they also have is the realization that physical occupation of the Canadian landmass is a massive logistical headache.
Imagine a more kinetic short term solution that seeds regional sovereignty, thereby performing a Great Reset on Confederation. Could America be a source of investment for such shadow governments in the pursuit of delegitimizing the Canadian bureaucratic state, looming in cold apathy and casting such suffocating darkness over its own people?
This project would require the formation of entirely new nations within the provincial boundaries, gathered around self-determination, electrified by reaction to a corrupt superstructure, and defined along identity lines negotiated between the people themselves. But what then do these nationalisms, however clearheaded and impassioned, do with themselves once coalesced? Their presumed successes would inevitably attract persecution from entrenched interests unless these upstarts were ready to assert themselves by other means. This means thinking geopolitically.
This is all irresponsibly speculative, of course. Inviting a separate colour revolution within every Canadian province sounds insane. However, creating breakaway system of support and governance for a people objectively betrayed by their government seems simply inevitable, and preparing for the autoimmune response from the security panopticon seems sensible. Deconstructing power structures surrounds one with strange bedfellows, but proposing systemic solutions is where the obscured demarcations are boldly highlighted.