Quotulatiousness

November 16, 2024

You say you want a referendum …

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest column, Paul Wells discusses the chances that we’re going to go into another maple-flavoured Groundhog Day marathon separation referendum in Quebec:

I’ve been thinking this for a while, but I haven’t written it down. We may be only a couple of years away from a national-unity crisis.

And the dwindling number of people with a working memory of the last crisis have retained instincts that will be useless if there’s another one. Any future Quebec sovereignty referendum campaign would be unrecognizably different from the first two, more chaotic and inherently unpredictable.

I’ve been doing some public speaking in Quebec lately, and it’s pretty clear from the Q&A sessions that even many francophone Quebecers haven’t thought through the ways in which a future sovereignty referendum might play out. So it’s time to start contemplating ghosts of Christmas yet to come.

The Trudeau Liberals aren’t the only political party in Canada that’s fallen and can’t get up. It’s looking grim for Quebec’s governing Coalition Avenir Québec too: Wednesday’s monthly Léger poll was the worst for Quebec’s governing party in eight years. Premier François Legault, who sailed to re-election in 2022 on the general impression that he had a unique sightline into the heart of the average Quebecer, has lumbered from crisis to crisis ever since. It’s rough when a leader whose intuition is his brand loses his touch.

What might make all of this a national story is the identity of the challenger who’s settling into Poilievre-esque polling dominance: Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon, the young leader of the Parti Québécois. Yes, that Parti Québécois.

Plamondon can be a charming and agile political performer. His PQ is at 35% in the latest Léger, up three points from last month. Legault’s CAQ is at 24%, down three points. Liberals and the urban lefty francophone Québec Solidaire are under 20%. Checking the last Qc125 projection, we see these numbers suggest a solid PQ majority for the first time since — wow, since Lucien Bouchard’s only victory as PQ leader in 1998.

A new PQ leader would have the option — would, in fact, be under harsh pressure from his party members — to call a referendum on Quebec’s secession from Canada. Younger readers may be surprised to learn this has happened before, in 1980 and again in 1995. Forests have been felled and ink lakes drained to tell the tale of how those two campaigns went. Short version: Quebec’s still in Canada.

Support for sovereignty is at a relatively low 37% in the Léger poll, and it hasn’t risen in pace with the PQ’s increasing popularity. That makes it possible, perhaps even likely, that Saint-Pierre Plamondon could join a list of PQ leaders who’ve become premier but didn’t hold referendums — a list that includes Pierre Marc Johnson, Bouchard, Bernard Landry and Pauline Marois.

But the instruction manual for politics in the 21st century is a single page, on which is written, DON’T ASSUME THE BEST. On my list of no-referendum PQ premiers above, I note that Johnson, Bouchard and Landry simply inherited power from their predecessors. Marois had only a minority of seats in the National Assembly.

Based on a small sample — René Léveque, elected 1976, referendum 1980; Jacques Parizeau, elected 1994, referendum 1995 — we can propose this hypothesis: when the PQ takes power with a majority government after a long period in opposition, it holds a secession referendum.

Support for sovereignty was around 40% when Parizeau called the 1995 referendum. It climbed to nearly 50%.

So here’s a plausible future. A federal election a year from now produces a majority Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre as prime minister. A Quebec election a year later, in 2026, produces a majority PQ government led by PSPP. He calls a referendum a year later on a relatively clear question.

Let’s consider the challenges for those who’d like Canada to continue with Quebec in it. The first one is obvious. The rest, based on my recent conversations in Quebec, apparently really aren’t.

As has been noted many, many times … if any of the referenda had been extended to the whole country, Quebec would have been an independent nation since 1995, if not 1980. To non-Quebec residents, it sometimes seems as if the federal government is actually an organization devoted to placating Quebec’s loud demands, rather than governing for all Canadians.

November 13, 2024

“The term ‘Maple MAGA’ is a derogatory slur used by Canadian liberals”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I have to admit I was only vaguely aware of the “Maple MAGA Mafia” identified by Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Christia Freeland, so I’m glad Fortissax is here to provide some background for me:

An insignificant yet loud minority among right-wing Canadian populists on Xitter are calling themselves “Maple MAGA”, with some expressing a reasonable desire for Canada to restore itself with a “MAGA ideology”. The term “Maple MAGA” is a derogatory slur used by Canadian liberals, coined by Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister — Wicked Witch of the North — and is not intended as a term of endearment. The more extreme accounts are even calling for the outright annexation of Canada by the United States, which all Canadians should oppose if they value their dignity and self-respect. I’d invoke the memory of our Fathers of Confederation, the innovation behind the Avro Arrow (once the world’s most advanced bomber interceptor), possessing the fourth largest navy in the world after WWII, Samuel de Champlain’s great expedition and exploits, the Filles du Roi, and the Loyalist Americans who, like Aeneas leading the Trojans after the fall of Troy in the Iliad, marched north to Canada after the Revolutionary War to found a new civilization. Yet, if they already knew or identified with our glorious past, they wouldn’t be so quick to support an even greater loss of independence and sovereignty to the almighty American empire.

Make no mistake, I admire and appreciate the United States, if that wasn’t clear. There are no people more similar to the Canadian people in the world than Americans. They are Canada’s largest trading partner. Both countries were born of Albion’s Seed, sharing the North American frontier experience, and forming a family of five great Anglo nations spread on four continents, once united under a single imperial government, and now vassals of its successor. Had the United States not elected Donald J. Trump, it would have continued down a path unopposed, as bad or worse than Canada under the liberal party. There is a very real opportunity for this American Caesar to reverse much of the socioeconomic and cultural damage wrought upon it by enemies foreign and domestic. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now X, once the bias was removed quickly became a right-wing dominant forum where truths long-feared would embolden many, everywhere to speak their minds. Elon fulfilled the ancient internet prophecy that all public forums with no censorship become right wing, simply because of the objective truths.

Elon didn’t turn it right-wing, he simply removed the government censorship of the DEI cultist board, and their allied state goons in the intelligence agencies from suppressing stories and information from reaching the American public, and the world. The Counter-Elite, a loose alliance of the Paypal Mafia, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and MAGA populists, in America are a force of nominal good, a positive for right-wing dissidents around the world fighting their own existential struggles against local managerial regimes. If Trump and the cast of would-be heroes succeeds, the United States will enter an era of unprecedented recovery for the forseaable future—though it’s not a magic bullet for the civilizational decline as recently written about by fellow Substacker Dave Green, aka The Distributist.

The United States was Canada’s first, and arguably still its greatest, existential threat — ironically, mostly through no fault of its own, but rather due to its Jupiterian gravity beside little Canada. Canada may be the second-largest country on the planet after the Russian Federation, but it’s a small nation, with only an estimated 28 million ethnic Canadians, 90% of whom live within 200 kilometres of the U.S. border, as much of the country is an inhospitable wasteland of spruce bog and rock, almost impossible to settle due to permafrost. The habitable areas are extremely hot in summer, or extremely cold in winter. Canadians have often looked southward at the Titan with a sense of fatalism. Many intellectuals and journalists over the centuries have wondered when, if, how, and where Canada would meet what felt like its “inevitable” dissolution into the hands of the Yankees. Despite these fears, that dissolution never came.

Yet whispers of provinces seceding — making the “great escape” from the failing post-national economic zone Canada has become to join the booming, recovering United States — are on the lips of some Canadians. If not outright secession, than abandoning the monarchy, establishing a constitutional republic modelled off of the United States of America, copying the constitution, and pathetically copying its culture. I believe the majority of right-wing Canadians would favour constitutional reform to enshrine our own equivalent of legally protected freedom of speech and the right to bear arms. These are ancient English traditions of the “Yeoman” or Free Man, with roots visible in free speech and weapon-carrying practices across the ancient Germanic world. They are by no means exclusive to the United States. Canada and England had considerably relaxed gun laws until recent decades, and changes like these wouldn’t require us to sacrifice our sovereignty to the U.S.

September 4, 2024

QotD: The modern tribal divide – the “Somewheres” versus the “Anywheres”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In his book The Road to Somewhere, my colleague David Goodhart identified two broad political tribes – those who see the world from Anywhere and those who see the world from Somewhere.

Boris Johnson’s election victory has once again brought this divide to the surface.

Anywheres tend to be younger and place more value on career and education – that is, they see themselves in terms of what they have achieved. They are also more comfortable with ethnic diversity and mass immigration, precisely because their identities are less rooted to place and group.

Somewheres, by contrast, are older and place greater value on the communities in which they live. This is not to say that Anywheres do not care about their community. Rather, Anywheres can see themselves prospering in any community.

Goodhart estimates that around 50 per cent of the population are Somewheres, 25 per cent are Anywheres, and the remainder occupy the grey area between the two camps. Both worldviews are perfectly legitimate, but the problem is that they can conflict.

From sitting in seminar after seminar, packed with policymakers, politicians, journalists and academics, Goodhart became painfully aware of how much the Anywhere view dominates public discussion, despite being a minority view.

Richard Norrie, “The revenge of the Somewheres”, Spiked, 2020-01-13.

May 28, 2024

Trudeau is at his very best in tackling imaginary problems

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper calls attention to just how much of the federal government’s attention is focused on problems that don’t actually exist, except in the Prime Minister’s vivid imagination, like the notorious “hidden agenda” of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives to turn Canada into the world of The Handmaid’s Tale by banning abortion (and undoubtedly forcing women to wear the distinctive red-dress-and-bonnet uniforms, too):

In Trudeau’s fevered imagination, this is what the Tories want Canadian women to be wearing in future.

The Trudeau government has initiated another round of warning that Canadian abortion access is at risk.

“Women’s rights, reproductive rights, and equality are non-negotiable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared at a recent speech, as Liberal Party social media accounts broadcast accusations that their opponents endanger a “woman’s right to choose”.

This would all make perfect sense in the United States, which has indeed seen a wave of new state-level laws effectively banning abortion outright.

But the Liberals are talking about Canada, a country that has no abortion laws whatsoever, and no political inclination to create any.

Polls show an incredible 80 per cent of Canadians supporting a “woman’s right to an abortion”. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn’t once touch abortion during his nine-year tenure.

As noted, Canada literally has no legal language dealing with the whole abortion issue … and therefore any Conservative government would have to create a new law to even begin to address an issue that a super-majority of Canadians are already against “fixing”. Conservatives can be incredibly dumb at times, but that would be stupidity of a very high order indeed.

Then, there’s Trudeau’s determination to link Poilievre with Diagonal, er, Dialagon, er, Dialysis, I mean “Diagolon”, which is apparently some super-powerful secretive extreme right-wing conspiracy to … do something diagonal-ish? I dunno. I’d never heard of ’em until Trudeau started trying to tie Poilievre to them:

Earlier this month, the Liberal’s main attack against the Conservatives was that they were in thrall to Diagolon, a supposed white supremacist militia with designs on destroying Canada from within.

“What has not been answered by the leader of the Opposition is why he chooses to continue to court extreme right nationalist groups like Diagolon,” said Trudeau in the House of Commons on April 30, one of several times he would slap down a question from the Conservatives by bringing up Dialogon.

Poilievre’s alleged ties to Diagolon are pretty tenuous. At a Nova Scotia fundraiser, among the attendees who queued up to shake Poilievre’s hand was Diagolon founder Jeremy MacKenzie, who claimed he did it just to get Poilievre in trouble. More recently, Poilievre visited an anti-carbon tax encampment where one of the RVs had a small Diagolon logo scrawled on its front door in permanent marker.

What’s more, multiple police investigations have concluded that Diagolon isn’t even a group, much less an organized anti-government militia.

It’s basically three guys on a podcast and their followers — whom they’ve occasionally met for BBQs. According to an RCMP profile of Diagolon put together at the height of Freedom Convoy, it was “exceedingly difficult” to nail down Diagolon as “a distinct group, with common ideology, a political agenda, and the cohesion necessary to advance such an agenda.”

The bought-and-paid-for Canadian media, of course, haven’t done much to point out just how ludicrous these accusations are, because even if they’re not, y’know, true, they are “truthy”. It’s not likely to change, as the legacy media still hate and fear anyone who might threaten their cosy subsidy deal with the Liberals.

And then there’s the Liberals’ fixed belief that Canada is the most racist country to ever have existed and that our entire culture is based on white supremacy and oppressing the “global majority” at all times:

Derived from the U.S. academic dogma of critical race theory, anti-racism holds that Canada’s basic structures — from its police forces to its justice system to its parliaments — are all fundamentally white supremacist. As such, they can only be remedied by “deliberate systems and supports” favouring “equity-seeking groups”, according to official Government of Canada literature.

The Trudeau government has established an Anti-Racism Secretariat, they’ve poured tens of millions of dollars into race-specific grants and they’ve subjected every arm of the federal government to anti-racism mandates and training.

Agencies such as the Canada Research Chairs program now openly screen for candidates based on ethnicity and other immutable characteristics. And perhaps most infamously, it was a federal anti-racism program that paid more than $500,000 to Laith Marouf, a virulent antisemite who has repeatedly referred to his benefactor as “Apartheid KKKanada”.

All of this has proceeded on the core assumption that Canada is — and always has been — a country defined by “systemic racism”. This was stated most plainly in an internal Canadian Armed Forces report which declared “racism in Canada is not a glitch in the system; it is the system”.

There’s a lot of (imported) fretting and huffing and puffing about this “issue”, yet there is almost no evidence for any of it being true in Canada. It would be statistically more likely to be true that much of our government and business organizations are actively over-hiring and over-promoting people on the basis of them not being white or male or heterosexual than the reverse.

April 16, 2024

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Impresa – the 1919 occupation of Fiume

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ned Donovan on the turbulent history of the Adriatic port of Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) after the end of the First World War:

Fiume was a port on the Adriatic coast with several thousand residents, almost half of whom were ethnic Italians that had been under Austro-Hungarian rule for several hundred years after it once having been a Venetian trade port. By some quirk, Fiume was missed in the Treaty of London, probably because it had never been envisioned by the Allies that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would ever truly disintegrate and the rump of it that would remain required a sea port in some form. The city’s other residents were ethnically Serbian and Croatian, who knew the city as Rijeka (as you will find it named on a map today). All of this complexity meant that the fate of Fiume became a major topic of controversy during the Versailles Peace Conference. President Woodrow Wilson had become so unsure of what to do that he proposed the place become a free city and the headquarters of the nascent League of Nations, under the jurisdiction of no country.

By September 1919 there was still no conclusion as to the fate of Fiume. Events had overtaken the place and through the Treaty of St Germain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been dissolved after the abdication of the final Habsburg Emperor Charles I. Once again, Fiume had not been mentioned in the treaty and the country it had been set aside for no longer existed. The city’s fate was still at play.

Enter Gabriele D’Annunzio, an aristocrat from Abruzzo on the eastern coast of Italy. Born in 1863, he was a handsome and intelligent child and was nurtured by his family to be exceptional, with a predictable side effect of immense selfishness. As a teenager, he had begun to dabble in poetry and it was praised by authors unaware of his age. At university he began to be associated with Italian irredentism, a philosophy that yearned for all ethnic Italians to live in one country – by retaking places under foreign rule like Corsica, Malta, Dalmatia and even Nice.

[…]

The Italian government’s lack of interest [in Fiume] was unacceptable to D’Annunzio and he made clear he would take action to prevent it becoming part of Yugoslavia by default. With his fame and pedigree he was able to quickly assemble a small private force of ex-soldiers, who he quickly took to calling his “legionaries”. In September 1919 after the Treaty of St Germain was signed, his small legion of a few hundred marched from near Venice to Fiume in what they called the Impresa – the Enterprise. By the time he had reached Fiume, the “army” numbered in the thousands, the vanguard crying “Fiume or Death” with D’Annunzio at its head in a red Fiat.

A flag designed by Gabriele D’Annunzio for the would-be independent state of Fiume, 1919.

The only thing that stood in his way was the garrison of the Entente, soldiers who had been given orders to prevent D’Annunzio’s invasion by any means necessary. But amongst the garrison’s leaders were many [Italian officers] sympathetic to D’Annunzio’s vision, some even artists themselves and before long most of the defenders had deserted to join the poet’s army. On the 12th September 1919, Gabriele D’Annunzio proclaimed that he had annexed Fiume to the Kingdom of Italy as the “Regency of Carnaro” – of which he was the Regent. The Italian government was thoroughly unimpressed and refused to recognise their newest purported land, demanding the plotters give up. Instead, D’Annunzio took matters into his own hands and set up a government and designed a flag (to the right).

The citizens of what had been a relatively unimportant port quickly found themselves in the midst of one of the 20th Century’s strangest experiments. D’Annunzio instituted a constitution that combined cutting-edge philosophical ideas of the time with a curious government structure that saw the country divided into nine corporations to represent key planks of industry like seafarers, lawyers, civil servants, and farmers. There was a 10th corporation that existed only symbolically and represented who D’Annunzio called the “Supermen” and was reserved largely for him and his fellow poets.

These corporations selected members for a state council, which was joined by “The Council of the Best” and made up of local councillors elected under universal suffrage. Together these institutions were instructed to carry out a radical agenda that sought an ideal society of industry and creativity. From all over the world, famous intellectuals and oddities migrated to Fiume. One of D’Annunzio’s closest advisers was the Italian pilot Guido Keller, who was named the new country’s first “Secretary of Action” – the first action he took was to institute nationwide yoga classes which he sometimes led in the nude and encouraged all to join. When not teaching yoga, Keller would often sleep in a tree in Fiume with his semi-tame pet eagle and at least one romantic partner.

If citizens weren’t interested in yoga, they could take up karate taught by the Japanese poet Harukichi Shimoi, who had translated Dante’s works into Japanese. Shimoi, who quickly became known to the government of Fiume as “Comrade Samurai” was a keen believer in Fiume’s vision and saw it as the closest the modern world had come to putting into practice the old Japanese art of Bushido.

The whole thing would have felt like a fever dream to an outsider. If a tourist was to visit the city, they would have found foreign spies from across the world checking into hotels and rubbing shoulders with members of the Irish republican movement while others did copious amounts of cocaine, another national pastime in Fiume. The most fashionable residents of Fiume carried little gold containers of the powder, and D’Annunzio himself was said to have a voracious habit for it. Sex was everywhere one turned and the city had seen a huge inward migration of prostitutes and pimps within days of D’Annunzio’s arrival. Almost every day was a festival, and it was an odd evening if the harbour of Fiume did not see dozens of fireworks burst above it, watched on by D’Annunzio’s uniformed paramilitaries.

D’Annunzio himself lived in a palace overlooking the city, Osbert Sitwell describes walking up a steep hill to a Renaissance-style square palazzo which inside was filled with plaster flowerpots the poet had installed and planted with palms and cacti. D’Annunzio would cloister himself in his rooms for 18 hours a day and without food. Immaculate guards hid amongst the shrubs to ensure he would not be disturbed. In D’Annunzio’s study, facing the sea, he sat with statutes of saints and with French windows onto the state balcony. When he wanted to interact with his people he would wait for a crowd to form over some issue, walk to the balcony and then ask what they wanted.

April 1, 2024

The most likely outcome of a 2nd US Civil War isn’t two successor states, but a modern version of the Holy Roman Empire

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kulak, at the start of a very long post on historical eras of centralization and decentralization, touches on the most likely outcome of a second US civil war, and it’s not a rump USA and a neo CSA:

Every time the subject of a possible US civil war or national divorce comes up I hear the same micron deep takes. America couldn’t break up because the division isn’t by state, its Urban Vs. Rural. Or that Urban vs. Rural isn’t the divide, even then people of different politics are mixed up together. Or that for every clear red or blue state there’s a purple state. None of which is in any way relevant to anything until you recognize the naïve mental model many of these people are working on …

These takes betray a belief that a second civil war would be some kind of conflict between coherent independent states who’ve started identifying with/against the idea of union such as happened in the 1860s … or that somehow there’d be a series of tidy Quebec style referendums resulting in a clean division such as exists in so many meme maps:

The truth is any post-breakup map of America would not resemble an electoral map following state lines, nor even a redrawing of state boundaries, such that the fantastical greater Idaho or Free State of Jefferson might exist as part of a wider Confederation of Constitutional Republics, or a Breakaway Philadelphia city-State join a Union of Progressive Democracies …

No. It’d be nothing so comprehensible or easily mapped to modern politics.

A post breakup America would probably look closer to this:

If you’re a sane person and your immediate reaction is: WHAT THE HELL AM I LOOKING AT!?

… Well that’s kinda the point.

(I really do apologize for all I’m going to have to digress)

For our purposes we can broadly divide history into 2 types of period … Periods of Centralizing trends, and periods of Decentralizing trends.

May 9, 2023

Apparently, we are all misunderstanding the Trudeau masterplan

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

All the smoke about Canada not having a national identity is there to hide Justin Trudeau continuing his father’s masterplan to DESTROY QUEBEC:

“Quebec caught in a trap. French forced into decline. Its political influence doomed. 12 million residents in Montreal. Quebec with 5 million. Ottawa’s grand plan explained. Justin is smarter than we think. They want to assimilate us all. All this, without any debate. Two catastrophic scenarios.”

Forget King Charles III’s coronation or the Liberal Party Convention. If you woke up Saturday morning in Quebec, this was the apocalyptic front page that graced your browser, courtesy of the Journal de Montreal:

The Journal‘s cri-de-coeur was in response to the federal government’s increase in the annual immigration level to 500,000 people. This increase, designed to boost the population of Canada to 100 million by the end of the century, would marginalize Quebec’s influence within Canada. It is estimated that Quebec’s overall share of the Canadian population would fall from 25 to 10%, while francophone Quebecers would be in the minority within their own province for the first time in 500 years.

This would displace Quebec from the center of power in Canada. Its official language, French, would be relegated to the same status as all languages and cultures other than English. Instead of being one of Canada’s two official languages, French would merely be one of many, and Quebec, no longer a nation, but a province like any other.

But wait: Journal authors further suggest that this was the grand plan of Prime Ministers Justin and Pierre Elliott Trudeau all along. In a very colorful column, “How the Trudeaus Drowned Quebec“, columnist Richard Martineau even compares the current PM to the protagonist of an infamous Stephen King novel:

“For Justin, Canada is not a country.
It is a hotel, an Airbnb.
And Quebec is just one of the many rooms in this vast real estate complex.
Room 237, here. Like the one in the movie The Shining.
Come, drop your bags and settle in! All we ask is that you pay your taxes.

It’s true that Trudeau Sr. paved the way for the reduction of Quebec’s power in Canada, but it didn’t start with his 1981 Charter of Rights, as the Journal claims. It actually began a decade earlier, in 1971, with the creation of Canada’s Official Multiculturalism Policy. The policy enshrined the idea that linguistic and cultural minorities in Canada should be encouraged to preserve their heritage, and allocated federal funding to help them do so.

Official multiculturalism was both a vote-getter for the Liberals and a means of diffusing the English-French “two solitudes” paradigm that was threatening to tear the country apart. At the time, Canada had just lived through the October Crisis of 1970, which had seen Trudeau invoke the War Measures Act in response to terrorist acts by the Front de Liberation du Quebec. Official multiculturalism was seen as a way to boost the federalist cause by aligning the interest of linguistic and cultural minorities within Quebec with those of the federal government.

The larger impact, however, was to enshrine multiculturalism outside Quebec, where most minorities settled, and where garnering favour with different cultural communities became standard operating procedure, particularly for the federal Liberal party. Immigration thus became a politically untouchable issue, except in Quebec, where the protection of the French language continued to take precedence over concerns for minority rights.

February 23, 2023

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had become “a marmite figure during her time in office, loathed and loved in equal measure”

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall looks at what caused the departure of Nicola Sturgeon despite the continued strong support for her party in Scotland:

Last week, Scotland’s most popular politician suddenly announced that she would retire. While Sturgeon’s popularity has dipped in recent days, she remains, by a long way, the most recognized and respected politician in the land. And she is leaving absent any obvious firing offense, nor any looming electoral deadline.

More importantly, Sturgeon is leaving without her raison d’être — Scottish independence — fulfilled, with the next election having already been framed as an (unofficial) referendum on that most cherished of prizes for any leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party. That Sturgeon would choose this moment to exit has prompted a flurry of speculation.

To Sturgeon’s credit, she was admirably clear with her reasons during the press conference announcing her decision to stand aside. She decried the “brutality” and “intensity” of modern political life, stating the job took everything she could give and that, like Jacinda Arden before her, she had come to the realization she didn’t quite have enough left to get independence over the line.

On that front, Sturgeon also said it would be unfair on her colleagues and her party to have her views on independence — and how best to achieve it — bind them if she no longer had the will or energy to contest the next election. And fair enough. Sturgeon has been First Minister for eight years, and was number two to former First Minister Alex Salmond for the eight years prior to that, having assumed the leadership after Salmond’s failed push for Scotland’s independence in the 2014 referendum.

And yet, with support for Scottish independence still fairly strong — a poll taken in late January had it at 52 per cent, an eight-point gap over the forces of unity — it still seems a strange time for someone whose entire life’s work has been ditching the UK to ditch the most powerful post to help usher it along.

So, what gives?

October 11, 2022

Quebec politics explained (in Quebec!)

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 9 Oct 2022

Politics in Canada’s French province. Thanks to Bespoke Post for sponsoring this video! New subscribers get 20% off their first box — go to https://www.bespokepost.com/jj20 and enter code JJ20 at checkout.

My election watching buddy Sisyphus55: https://www.youtube.com/c/Sisyphus55
(more…)

August 10, 2022

“Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.”

Filed under: France, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West on the historical divisions of the many regions in what we now know as “France”:

France is gigantic, like a continent in itself, and the most visited country on earth. It is four times the size of England and until the 17th century had a population four to five times as big (today it is 67 million v 56 million). Yet “France” until relatively recently extended not much further than Paris, in the area under the king’s direct control called the Île-de-France — beyond that, regional identity was distinctive and dialect pre-dominated.

As Robb writes, at the time of the Revolution just 11 per cent of the population, or 3 million people, spoke “French”; by 1880 still only one in five could communicate in the national language. Even with decades of centralisation, today there are still 55 distinct dialects in France; most are Romance, but the country is also home to Flemish, Alsatian, Breton and Basque-speaking communities. (Tintin has been translated into at least a dozen French dialects.) No regional identity in England, except the north-east, is as distinctive.

Many famous French historical figures wouldn’t have even understood “French”, among them St Bernadette, living in the then obscure village of Lourdes. She described the figure she saw as un petito damisela (or in French une petite demoiselle), the name for the local forest fairies in the Pyrenees. The Demoiselles dressed in white, lived in caves and grottos and were associated with water. They were also seen as being on the side of the poor, Robb points out, because here as is often the case there was a political underside to this folk belief. Indeed, a peasant conflict with the authorities from the 1830s to the 1870s had been called The War of the Demoiselles. But then conflict with the authorities — with Paris — almost defines French history.

[…]

If you like Robb’s work, you’ll also enjoy Fernand Braudel’s The Identity of France, published in 1986 and supposed to be part one of a series by the great 20th century historian. Unfortunately, Braudel was already dead by the time part one was published, and so the series was never finished.

Braudel loved his country and believed in a deep and abiding Frenchness, yet he was also fascinated by its divisions, the various different pay — from Gallo-Roman pagus — which translates as land, although it can mean either country or region. Within this, dialects can be very varied: Gascon is “quite distinct” to Languedocien and Provencal, he wrote, but in Gascony “two completely different patois” were spoken. Near to Salins the language spoken in each village “varies to the point of being unrecognisable” and “what is more extraordinary” the town “being almost half a league in length, is divided by language and even customs, into two distinct halves”.

France’s regional identity is defined by language, food — the division between butter and olive, wine and cider — and even roof tiles. Braudel was essentially a geographic determinist and, citing Sartre’s line that France was “non-unifiable”, the author lamented that: “Every nation is divided, and thrives on division. But France illustrates the rule rather too well.”

To illustrate the rivalry, compare the words of two 19th-century historians: Jean-Bernard Mary-Lafon, who contrasted the “refined and freedom-loving” southerners with “brute barbarism” of “knights from across the Loire”, violent, fanatical and pillaging. And Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1872: “I may be mistaken, but there is a view derived from historical ethnography which seems more and more convincing to my mind. The similarity between England and northern France appears increasingly clear to me every day. Our foolishness comes from the south, and if France had not drawn Languedoc and Provence into her sphere of activity, we should be a serious, active, Protestant and parliamentary people.”

He was surely mistaken, for it’s the south which is more Protestant and the north more Catholic. Just like in England, where regional and religious identity are intertwined.

Yet it is true that France’s great bounty was also its curse; this western European isthmus forms a natural unit within which the most powerful warlord could dominate, and that man was bound to be based somewhere on the Seine or Loire, close to the continent’s richest wheat-growing area. Yet in the early modern era this unit was far too big to govern effectively — 22 days’ ride from north to south — compared to England or the Netherlands. The author quotes an essayist who suggested that: “France is not a synchronised country: it is like a horse whose four legs move in a different time.”

July 29, 2022

QotD: The US Civil War as a “revolt of the elites”

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

They don’t teach it this way in college (for obvious reasons), but the Civil War was a revolt of the Elites. Put polemically, but not unfairly, The American People were offered four choices for President in 1860:

  1. tacitly pro-slavery;
  2. pro-slavery;
  3. fanatically pro-slavery; or
  4. fuck you.

These were embodied by John Bell, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively, but the names on the tickets really didn’t matter, because it all boiled down to two options: Some flavor of politics as usual, or fuck you. And here’s the important part: The vast, vast majority of the country voted for politics as usual. “Fuck you” got 39.82% of the vote, which by my math means that 60% of a country that would soon be conducting the largest military mobilization yet seen in the history of warfare wanted things to keep going as they were.

In fact, it’s worse than that. As much as I hate to credit him with anything, Barack Obama was right — He truly was a Lincolnesque figure, in that Lincoln was vague to the point of incoherence about his origins, aims, and platform, too. A vote for Lincoln wasn’t a vote for disunion; it was a thumb in Dixie’s eye, no more. In other words, it was a vote to put the ball in the South’s court — an electoral-college version of the double dog dare. We voted for “none of the above,” pro-slavery people, now whatcha gonna do about it?

We know the answer — they haven’t yet forbidden us from teaching the fact that secession happened sorta-kinda-quasi democratically — but for obvious reasons they don’t teach that the secession conventions were all rigged in favor of the fire-eaters, and even then the motions barely passed. Which, again, means that “politics as usual” was nearly the default position of guys specifically summoned to discuss ending politics as usual. If you want to say that the Civil War was started by about twenty guys nobody’s ever heard of, with names like “Louis T. Wigfall” and “Laurence M. Keitt,” you won’t hear much argument from me.

Severian, “Misunderstanding the Civil War”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-29.

July 15, 2022

QotD: Modern and historical multiculturalism

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For history’s rare multiracial and multiethnic republics, an “e pluribus unum” cohesion is essential. Each particular tribe must owe greater allegiance to the commonwealth than to those who superficially look or worship alike.

Yet over the last 20 years we have deprecated “unity” and championed “diversity”. Americans are being urged by popular culture, universities, schools and government to emphasize their innate differences rather than their common similarities.

Sometimes the strained effort turns comical. Some hyphenate or add accents or foreign pronunciations to their names. Others fabricate phony ethnic pedigrees in hopes of gaining an edge in job-seeking or admissions.

The common theme is to be anything other than just normal Americans for whom race, gender and ethnicity are incidental rather than essential to their character.

But unchecked tribalism historically leads to nihilism. Meritocracy is abandoned as bureaucrats select their own rather than the best-qualified. A Tower of Babel chaos ensues as the common language is replaced by myriad local tongues, in the fashion of fifth century imperial Rome. Class differences are subordinated to tribal animosities. Almost every contentious issue is distilled into racial or ethnic victims and victimizers.

History always offers guidance to the eventual end game when people are unwilling to give up their chauvinism. Vicious tribal war can break out as in contemporary Syria. The nation can fragment into ethnic enclaves as seen in the Balkans. Or factions can stake out regional no-go zones of power as we seen in Iraq and Libya.

In sum, the present identity-politics divisiveness is not a sustainable model for a multiracial nation, and it will soon reach its natural limits one way or another. On a number of fronts, if Americans do not address these growing crises, history will. And it won’t be pretty.

Victor Davis Hanson, “Things That Can’t Go on Forever Simply Don’t”, PJ Media, 2019-04-17.

June 13, 2022

The idealized EU that British “Remainers” still long for

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Brexit debate was at least as much a cultural as it was an economic or political struggle. Many of the people who wanted the UK to remain within the European Union would be instantly comfortable as members of Canada’s Liberal or New Democratic parties, as our “Laurentian elite” are culturally much more attuned to their European elite counterparts than they are to ordinary Canadians. British “Remainers” similarly have much more in common with their Euro counterparts than with ordinary Brits:

For many in the British cultural establishment, Brexit was (and still is) an incomprehensible, foolish rejection of the unqualified benefits of the European Union. The creative industries, according to one noted poll in the lead-up to the 2016 referendum, were 96 per cent in favour of staying in the EU, and many working in the arts and culture have been raging ever since. Britain’s contemporary artists are some of the most outspoken about Britain leaving the EU, to the point that some of them would rather leave Britain. Last week, speaking at an exhibition opening in the Netherlands, famed sculptor Antony Gormley announced that such were his strong feelings over Brexit that he had applied for German citizenship. “I’m embarrassed about Brexit”, he lamented, “it’s a practical disaster, a betrayal of my parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice to make a Europe that was not going to be divided again”.

[…]

None of our parents and grandparents who experienced the war, and the postwar reconstruction, would have envisioned the EU in its current form. It is a backroom technocracy of elites, making decisions beyond the reach of popular accountability, increasingly hostile to democracy and the aspirations of its millions of citizens. As many of us have always maintained, it’s possible to be for Europe, for fellow Europeans and for European culture – but against the EU.

The “little Englander” slur is one of the more ingrained prejudices of cultured Remainers. It has always been a way of expressing their contempt for those stuck with the consequences of the European project, those people unable or unwilling to shift from their “little”, provincial world and attitudes. These are the people, moreover, who the cultural establishment spent two decades up until the referendum patronising and cajoling. Arts policies and newbuild art galleries imagined that culture would rehabilitate the left-behind provincials of post-industrial Britain. Until, that is, post-industrial Britain voted the “wrong” way. (Gormley, with haughty disdain, has previously described Brexit as “a stupid moment of collective fibrillation” and “a disease”.)

Prominent Remainers profess their love for EU free movement, but studiously look the other way when it comes to its less romantic reality. Its only real achievement has been to facilitate the flow of cheap labour from poorer to richer EU states. This is the dominant economic reality of the free movement of labour, not the individualist idyll of foot-loose, self-determining bohemianism, or the career mobility of the well-paid creative. The latest Home Office figures for applications to the EU settled-status scheme reveal the stark trends in where Europeans, settling in Britain post-Brexit, are from: while the table is headed by poorer Eastern European Romania and Poland, these are followed by Italy, Portugal and Spain – southern Eurozone countries which were battered by the consequences of the EU’s stubborn and heedless imposition of the single currency.

While Remainers crow about insularity and “little Englanders”, it turns out that Britain is actually becoming more cosmopolitan, not less, since Brexit – just not in the way they mean it. Not only are 3.2million European citizens now fully settled and 2.6million “pre-settled” (meaning they’ll be fully settled after five years of residence), but also the British population is becoming more international. Recent ONS figures show that the number of workers not born in the UK has increased as a share of the labour force, from 17 per cent in June 2016 to 19 per cent in March 2022, with the increase made up of non-EU workers.

Update: Added the link to J.J. Charlesworth’s article at Spiked.

April 19, 2022

Alexander’s Successors (the Diadochi): Series Introduction and Historical Context

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Thersites the Historian
Published 24 Nov 2018

This video introduces my series on Alexander’s Successors by talking about what the series will be like and by going through the historical context that the viewer might need to understand the age of the Successors.

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February 5, 2022

A new biography of Nigel Farage

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For a man who’s never been elected to Parliament, Nigel Farage has been a major mover-and-shaker in British politics. In the Literary Review, Steve Richards reviews One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage by Michael Crick:

Most political figures come and go. Nigel Farage, in contrast, seems always to be around, close to the centre of the political stage. Sometimes he is leading a political party. Occasionally he is setting up a new one. Between such roles he is on television. Currently, the former leader of UKIP and the Brexit Party hosts a nightly show on GB News.

The consequences of Farage’s ubiquity have been seismic, reshaping the UK and the wider political landscape. He sought a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU and then a hard Brexit, and ultimately got everything he wanted. The Conservative Party’s embrace of a form of English nationalism was partly a response to the threat that Farage posed. The near-silence of the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, on the subject of Brexit is a form of vindication for him. Starmer knows that Brexit is having calamitous consequences but does not dare to say so. No wonder Michael Crick concludes that “it’s hard to think of any other politician in the last 150 years who has had so much impact on British history without being a senior member of one of the major parties at the time”.

Among Crick’s admirable passions is his interest in those individuals or forces that have shaped the major political parties from outside the mainstream. He wrote an important book on Militant, the left-wing group that in the 1980s sought to infiltrate the Labour Party and for a time made life hellish for Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, the two party leaders during that stormy decade. His biography of Jeffrey Archer, the Conservative MP who became a bestselling author and then a convicted prisoner, was revelatory. Now he has set his sights on Farage, who has never been an MP and yet has been such a prominent figure in recent years.

As Crick always does with his subjects, he has researched meticulously every twist and turn in Farage’s life. He regrets that his investigations were constrained by the pandemic. He need not worry too much. His diligence has enabled him seemingly to have unearthed every internal dispute in UKIP and the Brexit Party, along with the eccentric figures who lined up on different sides in them. The characters that emerge would fit neatly into a Dickens novel. One of the most unsavoury right-wingers to feature in the book is now an avid supporter of the Green Party, lives in Germany and is passionately opposed to Brexit – a novelistic metamorphosis. We are also reintroduced to Farage’s old friend Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP MEP and economics spokesman, who in 2013 famously hit Crick with a party conference brochure as the journalist pursued him down the street after he had made characteristically indiscreet and outrageous remarks in a speech to UKIP members.

This book is full of fights, usually between party members. We see Farage repeatedly falling out with other potential leaders. More prominent members who cannot hide their real views in public have to be admonished. Some flirt with the BNP. Even during the triumphant 2016 referendum campaign, there were two pro-Brexit camps, one led by Farage and the other by Dominic Cummings. Farage and Cummings loathe each other and their campaign groups fought bitterly for pre-eminence. This is the most striking theme of the book. UKIP and the Brexit Party, which Farage set up in 2019 to campaign for a hard Brexit, were utterly dysfunctional most of the time. They make the UK’s main political parties, all going through various existential crises at the moment, seem models of smooth, sophisticated professionalism. The amateurism extended well beyond the eccentric characters near or close to the top. Neither party offered coherent policy programmes beyond opposition to the UK’s membership of the EU.

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

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