Train of Thought
Published 26 Nov 2021In this video, we take a look at the tragedy of The General and how, what is now considered a classic of the silent era, was panned by audiences upon its release. Yes, I have been watching a lot of Buster Keaton films recently, how can you tell.
The General (Give it a watch): https://youtu.be/iHlBMKtgPOA
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This video falls under the fair use act of 1976
One of the pleasures of middle age is the utter freedom you feel when you realize it’s no longer necessary to care about pop music. This emotion takes several forms; at its worst you become a peevish coot suffused with suspicion: These youngsters are wearing their hats in a style that fills me with unease. But at its best, you realize that there’s more to life than pop music. You need not worry whether the sludgy thrash-rock ground out by yowling scowlers is post-punkabilly infused with a neo-hippie sensibility, or the other way around. If something new comes along that you like, fine. But don’t think it makes you hip. You’re not hip. Hip, like Trix, is for kids.
James Lileks, “Turning into an old crunker”, Star-Tribune, 2005-05-29.
In Spiked, Mary Dejevsky thinks that Vladimir Putin is very worried about losing control of the narrative:
Two quite contradictory messages are emerging about the success, or otherwise, of the Kremlin’s efforts to control what Russians learn about the war in Ukraine. On the one hand, there is still, it appears, widespread ignorance about Russia’s actions, and disbelief about reports coming out of Ukraine. In other words, the official narrative prevails. But on the other hand, the imposition of an increasing number of media curbs, including on two independent domestic broadcasters and a slew of international news websites, suggests the authorities are running scared.
One of the most dispiriting but salutary accounts of Russian awareness came from the anonymous writer of a St Petersburg diary. He or she observed that most people, in what is Russia’s cosmopolitan second city, were simply not aware that a war was going on, let alone of its extent or that Russia had, in fact, invaded Ukraine.
Their ignorance, the writer said, was dictated by the largely monotone state media, which referred only to a “special military operation” that had been launched with the limited aims of “de-militarising” and “de-Nazifying” parts of Ukraine. Something similar emerged from a BBC report about Oleksandra, who lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, trying to explain to her disbelieving mother in Moscow that Kharkiv was under attack; and also from Mikhaylo in Kyiv who discovered that his father in Nizhny Novgorod was convinced that Russia was saving Ukrainians from Nazis.
The swingeing nature of media curbs being introduced in Russia over recent days, however, suggests at very least apprehension in the Kremlin that another version of the war is seeping through. Today a special session of the Russian Duma – Russia’s parliament – passed a new law designed to “prevent the discrediting of the armed forces of the Russian Federation during their operations to protect the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens”. Offenders can be punished by up to 10 years in prison, and up to 15 years for distributing “false news” about the Russian army that leads to “severe consequences”.
Russia also started to block or severely restrict access to most international news sources, including the websites of the BBC and Germany’s Deutsche Welle.
Many, many pundits have ended up with egg on their faces for staunchly proclaiming that Vladimir Putin is too cautious and calculating to actually launch a full-on invasion of Ukraine, despite the drip-drip-drip of evidence beforehand that a military build-up was happening. Some have taken the hit and admitted the error while others ignore what they’d been saying only a couple of weeks ago. In The Critic, Phillips O’Brien points out that Putin’s long-standing admiration for leaders like Stalin has clearly become more than an inspiration for him and has become a model to emulate:
The “Big Three” meet at Tehran, 28 November-1 December, 1943.
Photo attributed to US Army photographer, via Wikimedia Commons.
Vladimir Putin fancies himself a great student of Russian history. He couched his justification for the invasion of Ukraine in a vision of Russia and the Soviet Union’s history that was paranoid, grandiose and incoherent, all at the same time. Ukraine needed to be subjugated by Russia because it was acting as a stalking horse for NATO and the West. At the same time, the West was declining and Russia had the strength to, in Putin’s mind, reincorporate Ukraine into its natural place within a Russian empire. Clearly, Putin has decided that this was the right moment to establish himself as one of the greatest Russian leaders of all time — an equal to Peter the Great, or Joseph Stalin.
As an obsessive student of Russian history, Putin has had an evolving view of Joseph Stalin over the years. Early in his authoritarian rule Putin kept Stalin somewhat at arm’s length, both praising and criticising Stalin’s record. More recently, as Putin has transitioned from autocrat to dictator, he has moved further and faster to identify himself with the greatest despot in Russian history. Stalin statues are now appearing in different places around the country, and respect for Stalin as a historical figure has risen strongly across Russia.
In the last few weeks, Putin has put this trend into overdrive and started behaving in a manner that apes Stalin almost perfectly. As Stalin in 1939 decided to invade the Soviet Union’s neighbour Finland, so has Putin today invaded his neighbour Ukraine. In both cases the decision for war was made by the dictator talking to a very small group of cronies, and in both cases the mass of the Russian people seemed indifferent or even hostile. Also, both invasions were disasters that revealed massive shortcomings in the Russian armed forces. In Stalin’s case, however, he was allowed time to rectify the problems, and his regime survived. It’s not clear that this will be the case for Putin.
The public meeting where Putin both embarrassed the other leaders in the Russian state security hierarchy, and forced them to publicly associate themselves with his decision to invade, was pure Stalin — if Stalin were alive today and could do it on television. As his rule became more bloody and despotic, Stalin increasingly forced his inner circle to endorse in writing his worst depredations, from signing the execution warrants of those slated for destruction, to publicly speaking in favour of policies that would force millions to starve. It both served his interest to humiliate his inner circle by reinforcing that they had to do his bidding no matter how onerous, and at the same time gave the impression to the outside world that his policies were strongly supported by the ruling circle. Putin is evidently doing the same, which is why he was so withering to the head of Russian intelligence, Sergey Naryshkin, when the latter seemed to waffle on the policy of recognizing the Russia puppet regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk.
A few days back, Theodore Dalrymple showed that there isn’t a Goldwater Rule when talking about Russian leaders:
When I watched Vladimir Putin, with what the Russians so graphically call his “tin eyes”, justify his invasion of Ukraine, I thought, as did many others, that he looked a little deranged. Denazification, indeed! Had he failed to appreciate that Ukraine, not noted throughout its history for its philo-Semitism, had elected a Jewish president, and that by a large majority, thereby suggesting a major cultural shift in the country?
It then occurred to me that Putin looked rather puffy in the face, and I wondered whether he could be taking steroids. These drugs are noted for their numerous side effects, not the least being psychological changes such as paranoia and elevation and depression of mood. Then there was the question, of course, as to why Putin would be taking them. Cancer, perhaps — a lymphoma? This brought to mind Evelyn Waugh’s somewhat uncharitable remark when Randolph Churchill underwent surgery for cancer: that it was characteristic of modern medicine to have removed the only part of him that was not malignant.
If Putin were taking steroids, his extreme and seemingly bizarre anxiety about contracting Covid-19 would be explained. Both the underlying condition of cancer itself and the drugs would have made him vulnerable to such anxiety, and the man who once liked to present himself as the Russian Crocodile Dundee, bare-chestedly wrestling bears and the like, has undergone a gestalt switch: invulnerability has been replaced by its opposite, unseen danger with every breath.
It is hazardous, however, to ascribe actions that we do not like to madness. This is for two reasons: first, the diagnosis may be wrong — the apparently mad may in fact be sane — and second, madness can have its own rationality. Indeed, the mad of strong character can often take others along with them: they can persuade others that their paranoid view of the world is correct. This is especially so when they possess levers of power over people of lesser character than themselves.
And finally, Ralph Berry offers a tiny bit of perspective on the almost universal condemnation heaped on the Russians for their use of artillery to attack Ukrainian targets with civilians nearby:
Of the real news, I select the serial bombing of Ukrainian targets by the Russians. Many civilians have been killed. This is presented as a war crime which must be pursued to the Hague. But the British have done it before. At the Normandy landings on D-Day, the plan was to take Caen on the first day. The landings on Juno beach were successful, but the following advance stalled and German resistance as so often made good the defences. As Anthony Beevor drily remarked, after noting that artillery was the arm on which the Allied commanders relied, “the French civilians, not surprisingly, felt that they did so to excess.” Caen did not fall, and Montomery changed the attack to bombing. This was merciless, and the French population suffered greatly. Not for six weeks were Caen and its environs controlled by the British and Canadians, by which time Caen was reduced to rubble. Some 3000 French civilians died during the bombing campaign. This fact should give pause to the widespread condemnation of what for the Russians is a regular practice of their system of warfare.
I’ve gotten a bit tired of reminding people on social media that almost everything we think we know about the fighting in Ukraine is — to a greater or lesser extent — propaganda by one side or the other. That said, Ukraine’s propaganda efforts have been far more effective than the Russian equivalents. In The Line, Jen Gerson rounds up some of the best-known stories that have flashed across Twitter and other social media platforms since the combat began:
Perhaps it’s simply the inevitable consequence of protracted news overload, but the war in Ukraine feels surreal. Pulling up the news, following Twitter, none of it feels like reality, but rather like we’re all collectively remembering an event that was always destined to happen. Perhaps I’m the only one suffering from this dissociative state? Or perhaps not; is anyone else feeling as if our daily life has taken on this faded quality of a simulacrum?
Maybe this is the inevitable sensation of watching a war play out on Twitter and TikTok. It has a participatory quality that offers the sensation of being a part of the conflict without the dose of necessary, reality-evoking risk.
Did you see the viral video of the Ukrainian babushka demanding the Russian soldier keep sunflower seeds in his pocket so that he leaves behind flowers when he dies? Or the one of the soldiers on Snake Island telling the Russian warship to “go fuck yourself” when asked to surrender? Reportedly, 13 died after that ship blew the station apart — though it appears that this was false and they in fact were taken alive.
Did you watch the Twitter video of Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky filming himself on the streets of Kyiv to thwart rumours that he had fled? Or the guy who moved an anti-tank mine from the road with a cigarette drooping out of his mouth?
Did you hear about the Ghost of Kyiv, a mysterious fighter pilot who has allegedly scored more kills than any other in recent memory?
Or the TikTok video of the young woman teaching her contemporaries how to operate an abandoned Russian tank; the stranded artillery towed by Ukrainian farmers; the men stuffing polystyrene into Molotov cocktails to make peasants’ napalm?
Oh, and in case you missed it: an official music video lionizing the Ukrainian drone, Bayraktar.
I can’t assess the reality of any of this — and I presume some or all of it is staged. That’s what propaganda is, after all. All I can do is examine the transparent unreality of it all, to take note of the ephemeral, the narrative. And from here, the Ukrainians are absolutely crushing the propaganda war.
On Monday, David Patrikarakos also came to the same conclusion in UnHerd after viewing the online echoes of the war:
The internet is a chaotic place, but it is nonetheless ruled by a series of iron laws, especially when it comes to what we put on it. Perhaps the most important one is that whatever you post, try to make it visual. Once that’s established it’s about what sort of image will best hoover up those likes and shares and retweets. Well, that’s down to where you are and who your audience is. But as a rule of thumb there are two things that generally never fail: blondes and guns.
Over the past few days, the very brave and very blonde Ukrainian MP Kira Rudik has been tweeting various pictures of herself posing with an AK47. She began last Friday:
What is striking about the photos is not that Rudik posted them: she is a people’s representative in a time of war — it’s exactly the sort of thing she should be posting. What’s so interesting, and smart, is how she did it. Rudik does not pose in a uniform, or even in camouflage fatigues. She does not salute or lift the AK triumphantly; in fact, the way she holds it makes it clear that she’s not used to holding a weapon of any sort. The photo is taken not in a base or even in an office, but clearly in the living room of her home, just by a window that looks out onto a small patio.
The final touch though — and it’s a genius one — is that she doesn’t have shoes on; instead she stands barefoot, her toes painted a delicate pink.
In one sense, this all seems irretrievably amateurish — but that’s the point. Of the many things the internet craves, authenticity is sacrosanct. And this is a model of the genre. The tweet is designed to do two things: first, to show that Ukrainians will stand and fight for their homeland; and second, to humanise those whom we are told will be doing the fighting. And it does this by showing them to be the most ordinary of people; people standing in their bare feet, vulnerable and ordinary — just like civilians across the world. As such, they stand in total contrast to the stormtroopers invading their lands. It’s pink toenails versus mud-encrusted jackboots; smiling mothers versus bearded Chechens — all shorthand for the battle playing out between Ukraine and Russia.
As Kurt Schlichter said, “The first report is always wrong and nobody knows nothing”:
The battle in Ukraine seems to be one of the most covered and worst covered events in history. You cannot spend more than two minutes on social media without crossing paths with a snippet of shaky cell phone footage of a Russian tank burning or some heroic story of sturdy Ukrainian resistance. You have experts on TV trying to tell you what’s happening but no one is actually giving you any real information. Maybe you think the Ukrainians are winning, that their counterattacks are driving out the Russian invaders. There are plenty of sources saying 2800 or 5300 or some other oddly large and specific number of Russian soldiers are dead. All hail the coming victory!
Well, we’ll see.
Don’t believe a damn thing you see or hear right now. I’d like to. I want the Ukrainians to win. But I understand that I, like you, am a target of information operations by Ukrainians, Russians, and even Americans. Get woke to it.
All that exciting footage? What do you know about where it was shot, or when? Nada. Zip. Zero. We’ve seen people trying to pass off simulator footage as real battle footage. We’ve seen explosions and fires without context. What caused them? Who knows when all you have is the label on the video? All those Russian tanks on fire? Well, guess what kind of equipment the Ukrainians use.
I don’t know if the Ukrainians are winning or losing, but I know that a lot of people in the media want them to win. So do I, but simply because I would prefer they send the Russkies packing does not mean that I am blind to what is an obvious and effective propaganda campaign designed to keep the West in Ukraine’s corner. And it has worked, with a few sketchy, wacky exceptions. I am impressed by the information operation designed to get resonant stories out there, like the defiant guardians of Snake Island, the “Ghost of Kyiv”, or that Ukrainian marine who was forced to blow himself up to take out the bridge. It’s like they were designed to appeal to us.
In short, we don’t know what’s happening — for excellent military reasons on both sides — and much of what we’re being told is almost certainly pure fiction. Keep your bullshit filters up and re-calibrate ’em if and when you get genuine information, but good luck on finding any of that in the immediate future.
In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith on the plight of Ukraine under Russian attack and the rather surprising success they have been having on western social media and in legacy media coverage:
Soon after the Russians invaded Ukraine, President Zelensky released a video to the world. Filmed on his mobile phone, it looked as if he could have been anyone else in the 21st century. He was tired and sad, and the skin was red around his eyes. Whatever a strong leader looks like, President Zelensky looked like the opposite.
That feels like a long time ago now. Somehow, the Ukrainians proceeded to launch the greatest PR operation of our times. How many people had heard of Zelensky, a veteran comic actor whose most significant action on the world stage since his electoral triumph in 2019 had been listening to Donald Trump’s ramblings, until a few days ago? How many people even knew there had been fighting in Donbass?
You have to wonder if the Russians, having seen the capitulation of the Afghan government, thought a Western ally would hightail it at the first opportunity. Zelensky, on the other hand, announced that he was staying in Kiev. His speech, addressed to the Russian people, was measured, dignified and eloquent. His little updates from the Kiev streets were mischievous and bold.
A weak country invaded by a powerful aggressor is naturally sympathetic. But the Ukrainian cause projected a uniquely irresistible combination of victimhood and strength. Theirs is not a tale of mere persecution but of underdog resolve.
What happened on Snake Island, for example, remains mysterious. The Ukrainians reported that their soldiers were killed after delivering a “go fuck yourself” to a Russian warship. The Russians claim they are alive. Still, the emerging image of unbreakable defiance, spreading across the vortex of social media, has won hearts and minds across the world.
What has been crucial is that people are not just pitying. They are inspired. We have heard relatively few tales of atrocities, because the Russians were attempting to minimise casualties, but also because the Ukrainians have attempted to maximise their triumphs. Did the “Ghost of Kiev” exist? Almost certainly not. But when such urban legends were combined with undeniably tough Ukrainian resistance in cities like Kharkiv, foreign sympathisers were encouraged to think that the Ukrainians, while embattled, had a fighting chance. This has been translated into sanctions on Russia and massive donations of arms and equipment.
David Warren reports that the Chinese government has accused the Ukrainians of trouble-making in Hong Kong:
This did not happen yesterday, I should explain, but some months ago. How did those clever Ukrainians do this, my reader may ask, naïvely. They did it by secular inspiration, when they uttered the phrase, “Slava Ukraini!” — which they had been doing in their own nationalist cause since the nineteenth century — and more aggressively since they fought for independence from the Leninist regime of the Soviet Union, during 1917–21.
Since 2014, the phrase has been in the air again, just as truck horns are in the air here in the Canadas. The Hong Kongois, who tend to be well-informed to a fault, picked up on it in 2019. They began to declare, “Glory to Hong Kong!” in multiple languages, from Cantonese to English; or rather, to sing it, for this phrase and its variants are often set to music, in both countries. (The Canadian trucker’s “Honk Honk” makes its own music.)
Wi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and little Justin Trudeau, all get quite offended by the use of such phrases; and all have gone to the trouble of manufacturing bare-faced lies to resist the respective sovereignty movements. Readers will gather that I am unsympathetic with any of these dictators, or Mr Would-Be.
Because I (or more exactly, my father) was also unfavourably inclined to the dictatorship of Mr Adolf Hitler, it may be incumbent upon me to specify of what my disapproval consists. For granted, Hitler was a nationalist of a sort. I have long been an enemy of nationalism, when it is rudely proclaimed, though with mysterious moments of enthusiasm for nationalisms of other sorts.
In The Line, Andrew Potter points out an interesting historical quirk where Canadian practice has long been at odds with most other western democracies:
On social media, it was common to see people lamenting this co-optation of the Canadian flag, with some wondering if it was even acceptable to fly the flag any more.
The reason this has been so disconcerting for so many is that a long-standing feature of the Canadian political landscape has been that the nationalists were predominantly on the left. As the author Stephen Henighan noted years ago in his essay “Free Trade Fiction”, this made Canada close to unique among industrialized, developed countries in the West, where the nationalists tend to be on the right. Left-wing nationalism is typically a feature of post-colonial states, where the fight for independence or liberation from colonial oppressors gets wrapped up into a nationalist narrative.
The reason left-wing nationalism has been so appealing to Canadians was precisely because of our weak identity and ongoing concerns over assimilation, first into the British empire, then later into the American continentalist project. If there’s a founding document of this tendency it is Margaret Atwood’s Survival, but it is prefigured by books like George Grant’s Lament for a Nation and finds its popular expression in everything from Heritage Minutes to the famous Joe Canada ad for Molson beer.
The left-wing focus of Canadian nationalism held sway from the end of the Second World War until about five years ago, and it was hugely consequential for Canadian politics. Most obviously, it helped establish the Liberals as the natural governing party. By making support for Liberal policies synonymous with defending Canadian independence, and by treating Liberal values as Canadian values, the Liberals were able to effectively frame their conservative opponents as un-Canadian.
On the continental policy front, it served to place a pretty clear barrier to deep political integration with the United States. In a 2005 essay that looked at the prospects for political co-operation between Paul Martin’s Liberals and George W. Bush’s Republicans, Joe Heath noted that the big obstacle to Canadian participation on things like Ballistic Missile Defence was the fact there was virtually no ideological overlap between nationalist groups in Canada and the U.S.
[…]
Today, things have completely reversed. A major catalyst for this shift was the decision by Justin Trudeau, when he came to power in 2015, to make denigrating Canada central to his Liberalism. It began when he started issuing formal apologies for past wrongs, at an unprecedented rate for Canadian federal governments. Then there was his acceptance of one of the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, that Canada committed genocide against Indigenous peoples. Then there was his decision last spring to order all federal flags to fly at half-mast after the reports of the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children who died while in the supposed care of the residential school system. The flags remained lowered for months, until pressure from veterans groups and the approach of Remembrance Day forced his hand and he ordered the flags raised.
Whatever the merits of any of these initiatives taken on their own, taken as a whole they set a recurring tone from the government, that Canadians were a fallen people. There is no question that dumping on Canada is a deliberate strategy for the Trudeau Liberals. What is less clear is whether, in persuading Canadian leftists to dislike their country, the prime minister realizes the forces he has unleashed in the process.
Glenn Greenwald on the war propaganda being pushed by both sides in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and how after two full years of “war on Wuhan Coronavirus propaganda”, we’re seeing a smooth transition to more traditional war propaganda from our governments and media:
In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.
Less than a week into this war, that can no longer be said. One of the media’s most beloved members of Congress, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), on Friday explicitly and emphatically urged that the U.S. military be deployed to Ukraine to establish a “no-fly zone” — i.e., American soldiers would order Russia not to enter Ukrainian airspace and would directly attack any Russian jets or other military units which disobeyed. That would, by definition and design, immediately ensure that the two countries with by far the planet’s largest nuclear stockpiles would be fighting one another, all over Ukraine.
Kinzinger’s fantasy that Russia would instantly obey U.S. orders due to rational calculations is directly at odds with all the prevailing narratives about Putin having now become an irrational madman who has taken leave of his senses — not just metaphorically but medically — and is prepared to risk everything for conquest and legacy. This was not the first time such a deranged proposal has been raised; days before Kinzinger unveiled his plan, a reporter asked Pentagon spokesman John Kirby why Biden has thus far refused this confrontational posture. The Brookings Institution’s Ben Wittes on Sunday demanded: “Regime change: Russia”. The President of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, celebrated that “now the conversation has shifted to include the possibility of desired regime change in Russia.”
Having the U.S. risk global nuclear annihilation over Ukraine is an indescribably insane view, as one realizes upon a few seconds of sober reflection. We had a reminder of that Sunday morning when “Putin ordered his nuclear forces on high alert, reminding the world he has the power to use weapons of mass destruction, after complaining about the West’s response to his invasion of Ukraine” — but it is completely unsurprising that it is already being suggested.
In the reporting and opining on the conflict in Ukraine, Mark Steyn says the frequent rhetorical invocation of Neville Chamberlain in 1938 are unfair:
Which brings us to this last day of February 2022. Which is beginning to feel like late February 2020, don’t you think? That is, in the stampede to impose the suffocating blanket of “the narrative” to the exclusion of all else. There is certainly a real country called Ukraine, where real people are being killed by real missiles hitting their apartment houses. Just as there was a real virus called Covid-19, which emerged from a real lab in a real city in China and began killing real people all over the world. Yet “the narrative”, then as now, seems designed to obscure any serious consideration of the underlying causes.
Nevertheless, certain things should be capable of being grasped even by viewers of CNN and readers of The New York Times. Just as Covid revealed that China is now the planet’s dominant economic power, so Ukraine confirms that America’s post-Cold War unipolar moment is dead: over the weekend, the talk shifted (again very Corona-like) from fifteen days to flatten the Tsar to an acceptance that this is a long-term thing — that, for a while at least, “a gas station masquerading as a country” (in John McCain’s characteristically stupid sneer) has succeeded in rolling back the great European liberations of three decades ago.
These days Neville Chamberlain is too invoked and the comparison is unfair. In 1938, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the Prime Minister went on the radio and described it as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. For America, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the precise opposite: a quarrel in a far-away country of which their leaders know everything. Because they’ve been up to their neck in it for years.
Ukraine is a beautiful place, its people are intelligent and agreeable, and its women are stunners. But it is a very poor country and, notwithstanding its many fine qualities, the most corrupt nation in Europe, and, per Ernst & Young, the ninth most corrupt in the world. As I pointed out regularly three years ago on Tucker and Rush, at a time when Hunter Biden was getting fifty grand a month plus seven-figure bonuses from Burisma, the average wage in Ukraine was $200 a month: The Biden family’s heist was “not a victimless crime”.
A far-away country of which we know nothing? Has there been any Washington scandal that has not involved Ukraine in recent years?
The Trump impeachments? Ooh, he telephoned … Ukraine!The “Russia investigation”? Putin wanted Trump to win why exactly? Oh, no problem: because he’ll roll back sanctions imposed for Moscow’s actions against … Ukraine!
Do we have any witnesses to any of this? Yeah, sure, the really good guy’s some Colonel Vindman. He’s an immigrant from … Ukraine!
On the other hand, Obama made Biden his point-man in … Ukraine!
Biden told the Ukrainians they had to clean up all the corruption. They took the hint and put Hunter on the board, and Joe, Jim and the rest of the mob family suddenly acquired extensive “business interests” in Ukraine.
Oh, and the biggest source of foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation is … Ukraine.
Kim du Toit linked to this post by N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval, which postulates that the real issue in western society is really a conflict between the laptop class and the working class:
… I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”
In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism“, the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”
I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here:
The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality”, as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
So let’s consider this using the protests as a lens, and vice versa.
To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.
The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.
The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.
For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.
Depressingly, the House of Commons approved Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act, and various officials at federal and municipal level have continued rhetorical scorched-earth statements to the media and directly on social media about the protest. If the stated need for those emergency powers has abated, why are the feds still pushing to hang on to them?
In the Toronto Sun, former Liberal Party president Stephen LeDrew is scathing in his criticisms of Trudeau:
Just walk or drive through cities and villages and the countryside, and see the Canadian flags — paired with signs expressing vehement disapproval of our federal government. Loyal Canadians are fed up with their federal government.
And one person is responsible for this — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
He has drastically altered Canadian institutions and norms so considerably that usually calm people are raising their voices in protest.
The core of the protestors in Ottawa and other Canadian centres were angry not only about government heavy-handedness in its pandemic policies, but also the changes being brought about by Trudeau.
He has cheapened public discourse and public life.
He talks so high-minded, yet has a lifelong history of deplorable acts.
He has arbitrarily ruined the lives of many other people who have been supposedly guilty of far less egregious acts than have been proven by photographs against him — perhaps to deflect his own guilt?
Does “do as I say, not as I do” strike home? How about “one standard for the masses, and another for the elites like me?”
His intolerance, and high-handed and ill-founded rectitude has led many to regard the government with disdain, and doubt its ability to get things right.
And now his decision to not only invoke the Emergencies Act (which most minds — those not cowardly beholden to Trudeau — agree was not necessary to get the job done in Ottawa), but to keep it in force for an undetermined period (to “hunt down” some Canadians to charge them with mischief?), has shown precisely how inappropriate Trudeau really is for this high office.
David Warren is, in his own words, modestly optimistic despite the current political situation here in the Trudeaupian Maple Dictatorship:
Our provincial and Dominion governments went formally off the rails of settled law in response to the Batflu epidemic, two years ago. They arrogated to themselves powers never previously claimed by our politicians, except in wartime — to regulate the smallest details of everyday life. It began with “two weeks to disable the Constitution and Human Rights”, both here, and under Trump across the border. The “vaccine passports” were merely the latest crass obscenity of this political and bureaucratic class.
I am modestly optimistic about the course of events, however. True, I must expect direct persecution by the Party of the Dictatorship, which is out to settle scores. But the Freedom Convoy sent to the national capital has shown, for the first time in many years, that a substantial number of Canadians will resist.
That a majority cannot cope with freedom, and are likely to squall when exposed to it, I take for granted. Humans have always been “conservative”, in this worst possible sense. But the splendid Canadian reaction to tyranny went beyond what I had hoped for. In particular, many articulate voices have been raised to speak truth — in the dark fever-swamp of lies in which our culture, and by extension our economy, is choking. This will make a huge difference. The sun is distantly shining; and the spring can once again be imagined. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, to filth accumulating in public life.
In 1993, the then-governing “Progressive Conservatives” were reduced from a majority, to two seats in Parliament, and then to extinction at the “federal” level. Men of good will shall be working towards a similar result, at the next general election, in which the Liberals and NDP should be annihilated.
While my dislike of Trudeau runs extremely high, I didn’t have much of an opinion about Chrystia Freeland, the deputy PM, until very recently. Apparently, I’m way behind the curve on disliking “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order”:
Sorkin’s Visa piece is suddenly relevant again, after fellow former finance reporter Chrystia Freeland — someone I’ve known since we were both expat journalists in Russia in the nineties — announced last week that her native Canada would be making Sorkin’s vision a reality. Freeland arouses strong feelings among old Russia hands. Before the Yeltsin era collapsed, she had consistent, remarkable access to gangster-oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky, who appeared in her Financial Times articles described as aw-shucks humans just doing their best to make sure “big capital” maintained its “necessary role” in Russia’s political life. “Berezovsky was one of several financiers who came together in a last-ditch attempt to keep the Communists out of the Kremlin” was typical Freeland fare in, say, 1998.
Then the Yeltsin era collapsed in corrupt ignominy and Freeland immediately wrote a book called Sale of the Century that identified Yeltsin’s embrace of her former top sources as the “original sin” of Russian capitalism, a “Faustian bargain” that crippled Russia’s chance at true progress. […]
Years later, she is somehow Canada’s Finance Minister, and what another friend from our Russia days laughingly describes as “the Nurse Ratched of the New World Order”. At the end of last week, Minister Freeland explained that in expanding its Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) program, her government was “directing Canadian financial institutions to review their relationships with anyone involved in the illegal blockades.”
The Emergencies Act contains language beyond the inventive powers of the best sci-fi writers. It defines a “designated person” — a person eligible for cutoff of financial services — as someone “directly or indirectly” participating in a “public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace.” Directly or indirectly?
She went on to describe the invocation of Canada’s Emergencies Act in the dripping-fake tones of someone trying to put a smile on an insurance claim rejection, with even phrases packed with bad news steered upward in the form of cheery hypotheticals. As in, The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets? Have been shared? By the RCMP with financial institutions? And accounts have been frozen? As she confirmed this monstrous news about freezing bank accounts, Freeland burst into nervous laughter, looking like Tony Perkins sharing a cheery memory with “mother”:
One of the oddest moments during the weeks-long protest in Ottawa was when “counter-protesters” showed up, but as one observer noted, they seemed to be at the wrong protest:
At first glance, it looked like one of the strangest, most incongruous moments of the great trucker uprising of 2022. There were the truckers and their working-class allies, in Ottawa, loudly agitating against Justin Trudeau’s vaccine mandates, when a bunch of hyper-woke, definitely not working-class counter-protesters rocked up to rail against this horn-honking throng. And what did they chant, these painfully PC counter-protesters? “Trans rights are human rights”, that’s what. As clear as anything, these supposed leftists, seemingly horrified by the sight of working-class men and women fighting for their rights, engaged in arguably the most striking non-sequitur of the 2020s so far – they brought transgenderism into an issue that has nothing whatsoever to do with transgenderism.
The truckers have said nothing about trans people. We have no idea what these pissed-off working-class drivers think about genderfluidity and all the rest. My hunch is that they think it’s nonsense. But we don’t know. This vast gathering of truckers and their supporters, which has so rattled the Trudeau administration and inspired copycat revolts around the world, is completely unrelated to sex changes and pronouns and the right of born men to beat women in sports and all the other things that fall under the banner of “trans rights” these days. So, understandably, many people were perplexed by the counter-protesters’ chant. “I don’t think they are at the right protest”, said one observer. Memes emerged, saying: “Truckers: Freedom for all! Counter-protest: Trans rights are human rights. Truckers: What??” What indeed.
[…]
In other words, that strange “trans rights” counter-protest captured a larger truth about the truckers’ uprising. Which is that wokeness has enabled the Canadian state’s exceptionally intolerant and violent assault on this working-class uprising. Many of us have marvelled at the allegedly radical left’s studious ignoring of the Canadian working-class revolt against the bourgeois state. But as more and more time passes, it has become clear that the left has not in fact ignored this globally important protest – rather, it has played a key role in legitimising state tyranny against the protesters, in providing the political justification for the Ottawa police’s violent wielding of truncheons and their crushing of working people. The woke are not mere bystanders, not mere wide-eyed shoulder-shruggers to this working-class uprising. On the contrary, they have been the moral facilitators of the state’s classist violence against the truckers and their allies.
British Pathé
Published 14 Apr 2013Kensington, London.
M/S of actor Peter Cushing sitting at his desk looking at papers in his hand. He takes a model toy soldier on a horse and compares it with its drawing. He puts it back and takes another toy soldier. C/U of his hand painting a white belt on the little soldier’s uniform. C/U on his eyes as he works — he must have a good eyesight to do this!
Peter Cushing, enthusiastic member of Model Soldier Society, collects, makes and plays with toy soldiers from all periods of military history. He plays with his toys in accordance to the rules laid down by H.G. Wells in his book Little Wars. M/S of Mr Cushing getting off his chair, approaching a little battlefield laid out on the floor. He organises the battlefield to match a map in his hand.
Voiceover tells the audience that many of historical figures played this game, for example Napoleon [obv. not following the rules devised by Mr. Wells]. It engages the mind of a person as much as the game of chess, which means it is not as simple as it looks. M/S of Mr Cushing kneeling on the floor, putting a horse drawn carriage next to a little house. Top panning shot reveals his little battlefield: soldiers, huts, horses, trees, farms …
M/S of Mr Cushing taking a cigarette, putting it in his mouth and lighting it while observing the battlefield. C/U shot of H. G. Wells’ book Little Wars.
A VIDEO FROM BRITISH PATHÉ. EXPLORE OUR ONLINE CHANNEL, BRITISH PATHÉ TV. IT’S FULL OF GREAT DOCUMENTARIES, FASCINATING INTERVIEWS, AND CLASSIC MOVIES. http://www.britishpathe.tv/
British Pathé also represents the Reuters historical collection, which includes more than 136,000 items from the news agencies Gaumont Graphic (1910-1932), Empire News Bulletin (1926-1930), British Paramount (1931-1957), and Gaumont British (1934-1959), as well as Visnews content from 1957 to the end of 1984. All footage can be viewed on the British Pathé website.
H/T to Jon Salway for the link.
Folding Ideas
Published 10 Feb 2017Clickbait title: Nazis hate him! Secrets of propaganda exposed!
This took far longer to put together than I’d anticipated. It wasn’t even the work itself, it’s the emotional load. I eventually had to start chopping out huge planned segments, like looking at modern propaganda like that awful “Surfing in the DPRK” white guy rap video. I’m sorry about the downer ending, but there’s no way to spruce it up. To a certain degree we lost.
You should seriously read, and then re-read, Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism”. It’s available online for free. It’s not that long. Here, I’ll even link it for you. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/…
Books mentioned:
Urania’s Children
The Occult Roots of Nazism
The Origins of TotalitarianismWritten and performed by Dan Olson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman
David Warren notes that if nothing else, the Freedom Convoy has managed to get some central Canadians to turn against the national flag:
There is one interesting, nearly universal feature of the demonstrations in Canada for political freedom. The members — called a “small fringe minority” by our prime minister — would seem to be almost entirely Christian. They are also patriotic, as is evident even to legacy media, who feel compelled to use photographs and footage, and thus to admit a fragment of the truth. Canadian flags are exhibited on the grilles of the honking trucks, and generally.
Indeed, a Globe reporter has tweeted that she is now traumatized by this experience, of being confronted by Canadian flags. She gags at what I used to call the “Pearson pennant”. (It is only in the last few weeks, that I have ceased to be “traumatized” by it, myself; though truth to tell, I’m not the “traumatized” type.)
But the Christian attachments, among the protestors, is not waved about as a flag. It is expressed mostly in prayers, and the articulation of blessings, and in subtle decorations worn close to head and heart, that may be illegal in Quebec.
Batya Ungar-Sargon reports on the situation in Ottawa for Spiked:
It’s been quite a few weeks for our neighbours to the north. Three weeks ago, a ragtag, grassroots campaign of disgruntled truckers made their way to the Canadian capital to protest a government vaccine mandate. As of last night, two of the organisers of what has been, by all accounts, a peaceful protest have been arrested, giving Canada – a country that bills itself a democracy – its first political prisoners in recent memory.
On Thursday, Chris Barber was arrested, while Tamara Lich had her personal bank account frozen and was detained on a charge of “aiding and abetting mischief” – a trumped-up charge resulting directly from a naked power grab by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Instead of meeting with his citizens to hear their demands, Trudeau has spent the past three weeks smearing them as hateful and violent. On Monday he became the first Canadian leader to invoke the Emergencies Act – giving his government a series of draconian powers. Without one iota of evidence that the “violence” of the truckers’ protests has ever exceeded honking, Trudeau broadened the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing rules, putting the striking truckers on a par with terrorists, suspending their civil liberties and allowing banks to freeze the personal accounts of anyone linked to them. Now Trudeau is having them arrested. And on Friday morning, he cancelled a parliamentary session in which his edict was due to be voted on, and could have potentially been revoked, by the House of Commons or the Senate.
The truckers’ protest began with Trudeau smearing the truckers as Nazis and fascists – a line gladly repeated, day in day out, by reporters and pundits in the elite liberal media. It is now ending with those same elites cheering on Trudeau’s authoritarianism.
Although the media have promoted Trudeau’s falsehoods and cheered his overreach, many Canadians see the protests for what they are. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is taking the federal government to court for invoking the Emergencies Act. “It’s possible for protests to be both disruptive and peaceful”, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, its executive director, rightly argued. Others have pointed out Trudeau’s hypocrisy. In 2020 the Canadian PM threw his support behind both Black Lives Matter’s disruptive protests and protesting farmers in India who were blocking major highways. “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest”, Trudeau said back then.
H/T to Samizdata for the link.
Of course, it’s totally reasonable (in the government’s view anyway) to set the mounted unit and riot-helmeted, baton-wielding police against the dangerous bouncy castle terrorists in Ottawa, but on the other side of the country actual terrorist actions are being downplayed:
There has been an outbreak of political violence in Canada. A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was hurt and people going about their daily business were threatened by masked men with axes. Roads were blocked with barricades, Millions of dollars of damage was caused. At one point some of the workers were trapped in a building while the demonstrator tried to set light to it with them still inside.
This happened on Thursday night. It didn’t happen in Ottawa where hundreds of truck drivers maintained their protest despite emergency powers being granted to the authorities. Powers to steal their trucks, close their bank accounts – including those who have donated to their cause, and now they are talking about forcibly removing their children, and euthanising pet dogs, all because they have engaged in peaceful protest. People who have been vilified in the Canadian media as terrorists or as insurrectionists intent on overthrowing the democratically elected government of Canada as the January 6th protesters did at the White House, but this time in plaid shirts.
No this attack took place, not in Ottawa, but in British Columbia, at an industrial site. This is what the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) had to say: “Shortly after midnight, Houston RCMP was called to the Marten Forest Service Road (FSR) after Coastal Gas Link (CGL) security reported acts of violence at their work site … approximately 20 people, some armed with axes, were attacking security guards and smashing their vehicle windows …
“Upon police attendance at the 41 km mark, the roadway had been blocked with downed trees, tar covered stumps, wire, boards with spikes in them, and fires had been lit throughout the debris. As police worked their way through the debris and traps, several people threw smoke bombs and fire lit sticks at the police, injuring one officer.
“At the 43 km mark, an old school bus blocked the road … When police arrived … they found significant damage had been done to heavy machinery, fencing, and portable buildings …
“This is a very troubling escalation in violent criminal activity that could have resulted in serious injury or death. This was a calculated and organized violent attack that left its victims shaken and a multimillion dollar path of destruction,” says Chief Superintendent Warren Brown, North District Commander, “While we respect everyone’s right to peacefully protest in Canada, we cannot tolerate this type of extreme violence and intimidation. Our investigators will work tirelessly to identify the culprits and hold them accountable for their actions.”
And from the “That was then, this is now” file, here’s Justin Trudeau taking a knee over police brutality in the far, distant days of the past:
H/T to JoNova for the screencap.
Parliament was scheduled to debate the Prime Minstrel’s use of the Emergencies Act, but the session was cancelled because the Ottawa police were conducting an “operation” on Parliament Hill. The police also warned journalists to avoid the area for their own safety. Nothing disturbing or authoritarian about attempting to ensure that there won’t be any independent reports on the “operation”, right? This isn’t the kind of “free and democratic society” most of us imagined it was just a few days ago.
Jordan Peterson points out the amazing tone-deafness of the federal government on yet another topic:
ReasonTV looked at the “Revolt of the Canadian Truckers” and compared it to other populist protest movements of recent years:
PPC leader Maxime Bernier sent out this email to supporters:
There is violence in the streets of Ottawa.
The police, armed with riot gear, are brutalizing and arresting peaceful demonstrators from the truckers’ convoy.
Meanwhile, Parliament is not sitting today because of this police operation. All parties agreed to stay away while the regime cracks down on dissidents.
Just like in a banana republic.
They should have been debating Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.
The Emergencies Act replaced the War Measures Act in 1988. The only other times in Canadian history that it was invoked were during the First and Second World Wars, and during the October Crisis in 1970.
There is no emergency in Canada. No war, no insurrection, no terrorist attack, no sanitary or environmental catastrophe that justifies invoking this law.It’s outright illegal, undemocratic, and unconstitutional for this government to give itself exceptional powers to deal with peaceful demonstrators.
It’s a power grab on Trudeau’s part to crush dissidence, that’s all it is.
Trudeau and his Finance minister Chrystia Freeland have given themselves the power to freeze the bank accounts not only of the organizers of the Freedom Convoy, but of anyone who is suspected of helping and funding them.
And we’re supposed to believe that a government that has violated our Constitution and our rights and freedoms for two year will not abuse these new powers?
Nicholas, it’s a dark day for Canada.
But it’s not over. We will continue to fight this authoritarian government, and bring back freedom, respect and justice to this country.
Don’t despair. Stay strong and free.
-Max
The good folks at Spiked explain why the truckers must win:
GiveSendGo sent an email in response to queries about whether the truckers had received the money that had been donated:
Where’s the money?
The questions keep on coming, so we want to answer!
The number one question people are asking right now is, “Have the truckers received the funds?” Our answer is this: “Yes, the truckers have received some of the funds paid out to the ‘Adopt a Trucker’ campaign.”
As this plays out with the Canadian government, there have been steps taken to prevent the funds from being “frozen”. Currently, the bulk of the funds are in an undisclosed U.S. bank.
Right now, the teams involved are actively discussing the legal options for getting the funds where they need to go. (Thank you to those who’ve sent in suggestions, you’ve definitely had some creative ones!)
What we need from you:
We ask that you do not request a refund at this time as these funds will be needed for the truckers and their legal teams. Additionally, please be patient and pray for wisdom for all involved. We will keep you updated as we move forward.
Thank you for all your prayers and support over these past few weeks!
“But as for you, be strong and courageous, for your work will be rewarded.” 2 Chronicles 15:7
Shine Brightly!
Last week in UnHerd, Andrew Doyle, the comedian behind the wonderful Twitter troll account “Titania McGrath”, explained why trolling today is so likely to succeed:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
This technique is the precursor to what we now call “trolling”. The term is often misused as a synonym for malicious and bullying online behaviour but, as traditionally understood, trolling is the art of coaxing people into a reaction. Motivations vary from troll to troll. For some, it is simply a matter of revelling in the gullibility of strangers. For others, the intention is to expose the vices and shortcomings of those in power.
Jonathan Swift was an early exponent of this kind of trolling in the creation of his alter-ego Isaac Bickerstaff, who wrote pamphlets which predicted, and then announced, the death of the astrologer John Partridge. Swift resented Partridge because of his attacks on the church, and must have been immensely gratified that Bickerstaff’s announcement had been taken on trust by so many. It is said that Partridge was thereafter continually having to fend off queries about his uncanny resemblance to a dead man.
[…]
Many of those duped by [Chris] Morris [in the TV series Brass Eye, 1997] were seemingly happy to read aloud any hogwash from an autocue in return for television exposure and the impression that they were on the right side of history. Such hoaxes could potentially be even more effective in today’s climate, with so many soft-witted celebrities eager to endorse fashionable but illiberal notions they barely understand. All major political, educational, artistic and corporate bodies are seemingly in submission to a new identity-obsessed religion of “social justice” that couches its regressive ideas in progressive terminology.
But, unlike the days of Brass Eye, the jesters are now in lockstep with these establishment lines, and so the most pertinent sources for satire are generally left untapped. They are, as Morris recently put it, more interested in “doing some kind of exotic display for the court” than exposing the follies of the powerful.
It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one of the most impressive hoaxes of recent years has come from outside the comedy industry. In October 2018, it was revealed that Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had spent a year writing and submitting bogus academic papers to various journals in order to show how certain branches of the humanities were now routinely prioritising ideological goals over the pursuit of truth and knowledge. By the time the hoax was exposed, seven of their 20 articles had been accepted for publication, and a further seven were in the process of review.
As a work of satire, this project was an undoubted success. It provided evidence of what many had long suspected, that nonsensical ideas could thrive within the academy so long as they were camouflaged in vogueish jargon. One paper purported to be a study of the sexual activity of dogs in urban parks, and used this phoney data to draw conclusions about contemporary “rape culture”. Another argued that white male students ought to be chained to the floor during lessons as a form of reparation for slavery. Most audacious of all was the article based entirely on a chapter of Mein Kampf, rewritten in the language of intersectional feminist theory.
That all of these articles were accepted for publication in peer-reviewed journals should have alerted academics to a troubling strain of corruption and fraudulence in their field. They should have resolved to rectify the problem, but instead chose to demonise and smear the hoaxers who had exposed it. When satirists hit on uncomfortable truths, they are rarely thanked for their efforts.
In Monday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh considers what this mysterious and esoteric word “freedom” seems to mean to the CBC:
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
You may have heard that truck-driving protesters have taken over downtown Ottawa and several important border crossings here in Canada. These festive but obstructive people often claim, it is said, to be seeking some esoteric substance known as “freedom”. NP Platformed, unable to locate this “freedom” in the conventional periodic table, consulted a range of chemists in search of expert advice.
One suggested that the word was plainly a misspelling of “friedium”, implying the existence of an element or other matter known only to the Germans. Several hypothesized a molecular relationship with the abolished industrial refrigerant “freon”, raising questions about whether the Montreal Protocol has been subverted. Firm conclusions eluded our quest, but we are sure that a royal commission of inquiry will eventually be convened to get to the bottom of it all.
CBC News, confronted with the same information, did not appeal to the good old exact sciences for help. Instead, its reporters rang up every “hate” expert in their Rolodex of left-wing academics. This yielded tidbits of wisdom, such as this one: freedom “is a term that has resonated … You can define it and understand it and sort of manipulate it in a way that makes sense to you and is useful to you, depending on your perspective.” We’re pretty sure our chemical theories are less stupid than whatever this is supposed to be, but it does bear the imprimatur of Ontario Tech University, the renowned (checks notes) Oshawa-based home of the (checks notes again) Ridgebacks.
The CBC’s obtuse explanation of how the word “freedom” has been used in the past by fascist nasties, and absolutely nobody else in the annals of history, is rightly coming in for plenty of heckling. NP Platformed couldn’t resist joining in, but we would observe that this news copy bears signs of an actual journalistic crisis. If you are paying attention, you have heard about, or even seen video of, the torrents of abuse received by CTV and Global news reporters visiting the “Freedom Convoy” in Ottawa. One can only imagine the fear and frustration of CBC News employees, who know that they are much more attractive targets for misbehaviour — being a recognized part of the Ottawa blob that hinterland protesters are in town specifically to torment and terrorize.
Most of them are no doubt staying well clear of the protests, and for the public broadcaster to develop good sources within an amorphous CBC-hating right-wing movement is a plain impossibility. What’s left is Rolodex journalism. We did a lot of it back in the day, at the late, legendary Alberta Report — which, in our time, was vigorously hated by somewhere between half and two-thirds of the population of Alberta.
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