Category Archive 'Justin Trudeau'

20 Feb 2022

Brave New World Canada

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Leighton Woodhouse notes how readily the Canadian state has employed the establishment’s alliance with Big Tech and Finance to deprive opponents not only of the means to protest and resist, but even of the means to live.

When Edward Snowden warned that the digital mass surveillance state built by tech corporations and government intelligence agencies amounted to a “turnkey tyranny,” what’s happening right now in Canada is exactly what he meant. Just as armed drones have made waging war as easy as playing a video game, information technology has taken the friction out of building an authoritarian state. It used to be hard to repress people. You’d have instill enough fear or distribute enough patronage to get the police and the military in line with your ambitions; you’d have to actually send the goons out to crack skulls; you’d have to control the judges and set up kangaroo courts to fill your prisons with your political enemies. It was all very ugly and messy and at every point along the way you’d be sure to meet stubborn and potentially violent resistance.

And in fact, Trudeau has sent the goons out to crack a few skulls, but that’s almost parenthetical to the real power the Canadian government is wielding against its citizens: the power to force consent by depriving families of their livelihoods. The Canadian government has directed financial institutions to freeze bank and credit card accounts not only of direct participants in the trucker convoy, but of those who have donated to them. It’s basically an old school starvation siege, but executed digitally instead of physically and with the aim of clearing out a city rather than conquering it. And Trudeau’s government has made clear that it won’t end with the truckers going home.

The power the Canadian government has arrogated to itself is both stupefying and technically easy to do. Per Snowden, that’s what sets this century apart from the last one: radically abridging the civil liberties of entire populations requires no particularly strenuous effort, just an audacious act of will. …

In the last century, what’s happening in Canada might have been described as a class war waged from above. That is, it’s a war of the ruling class on an organized and rebellious cadre of the working class. But in 2022, a more useful framework can be found in Martin Gurri’s conception of “the center” versus “the periphery” (actually, Gurri says “the border,” but for reasons I won’t bore you with, I prefer “periphery”). The “center” is the political, economic and cultural establishment, embodied by Justin Trudeau better than anyone in the world. The “periphery” is the anti-establishment riff-raff, organized loosely and spontaneously online, fusing together dissidents of all flavors: left, right, and neither. Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados, the Yellow Vests, the truckers — these are the postindustrial peasant revolts of the periphery.

In its confrontation with the center, the periphery uses instruments its opponent cannot control: the tools of memetic propagation and online mobilization. Culturally, the internet is a flat, decentralized and chaotic place, which bestows an inherent advantage on the anti-establishment public in its campaign of asymmetric warfare against the center. But structurally, the internet is the opposite: it’s a hierarchical, highly centralized and strictly ordered space where attention is channeled through a small number of colossal platforms and money flows through a half dozen giant payment processors. This concentration of power is a potent tool in the hands of the center: to shut down the periphery, it needs only to influence the actions of a handful of actors, each of whom are themselves high profile members in good standing of the establishment. All the center needs to do is apply sufficient political pressure on a few chummy corporate leaders and a rebellion can be suppressed without a single shot fired: much cleaner, safer and aesthetically inoffensive than bringing the full, naked power of the state down on dissidents like it was 1989 in Tiananmen Square. …

This is what we have to look forward to: surgical authoritarianism. In the twenty-first century, the brute coercive power of the state will not require the construction of a totalitarian apparatus to control our actions and thoughts at all times in all places, as it did in the last one. In normal times, dissent will be happily tolerated. But when the state feels truly threatened, it will merely log into the operating system of our digital society, switch to God Mode, hit a few keystrokes and nuke its opposition.

RTWT

11 Feb 2022

Trudeau’s Own Ceausescu Moment

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The Ceausescus facing the firing squad.

We live in remarkable times. The Establishment Left has gone so far off the rails that it has actually turned several of the most active and talented left-wing journalists into outsider opponents.

Matt Taibbi (one of the most conspicuous examples of the honest leftist, like George Orwell, who has had enough and changed sides) sees History repeating itself again (this time as Comedy).

On the morning of the 21st of December, 1989, Romanian General Secretary Nicolae Ceaușescu was in a foul mood. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush had recently announced the end of the Cold War, making the end of Ceaușescu’s rule inevitable, though he couldn’t see this yet. Worse, his security leaders had just failed to violently put down protests in the city of Timisoara, a fact that enraged his wife Elena.

“You should have fired on them, and had they fallen, you should have taken them and shoved them into a cellar,” she said. “Weren’t you told that?”

Long one of the world’s most vicious dictators, Ceaușescu’s most recent plan for winning over the heartland was forcing half the country’s villagers to destroy their own homes — with pick-axes and hammers, if they couldn’t afford a bulldozer — and packing them into project apartments in new “agro-industrial towns,” for a “better future.” Despite this, and his long history of murder, terror, and spying, Ceaușescu to the end did not grasp that his unpopularity had an organic character. He was convinced ethnically Hungarian “terrorists” were behind the latest trouble.

After reaching the balcony of Bucharest’s Central Committee building to give a speech that December day, he’s genuinely surprised when the crowd turns on him. When he tells them to be quiet, he’s befuddled by their refusal, saying, “What, you can’t hear?” Elena jumps in and yells, “Silence!”, to which Ceaușescu, hilariously, replies, “Shut up!” The crowd listens to neither of them.

Paul Kenyon’s Children of the Night describes the morbid black comedy that ensued. The Ceaușescus and a motley gang of undead apparatchiks that included the “morbidly obese Prime Minister, Emil Bobu” later tried to load into a single helicopter — Bobu “waddled, walrus-like, to the rear” Kenyon writes — but there were too many of them, and the copter barely got off the ground. “Where to?” asked the pilot, and nobody knew, because there was no plan, since none of them had ever considered the possibility of this happening.

The sky was full of stuff, including other helicopters, which were dropping leaflets on the crowd giving what Kenyon described as a Marie Antoinette-like order to ignore “imperialist conspiracies” and return home “to a Christmas feast.” Four days later, a firing squad put the Ceaușescus against a wall and gave them their final, solid lead Christmas presents.

Ceaușescu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination. The neoliberal political establishment in most of the Western world, the subject of repeat populist revolts of rising intensity in recent years, seems to suffer from the same disability.

There may be no real-world comparison between a blood-soaked monster like Ceaușescu and a bumbling ball-scratcher like Joe Biden, or an honorarium-gobbling technocrat like Hillary Clinton, or a Handsome Dan investment banker like Emmanuel Macron, or an effete pseudo-intellectual like Justin Trudeau. Still, the ongoing inability of these leaders to see the math of populist uprisings absolutely recalls that infamous scene in Bucharest. From Brexit to the election of Donald Trump to, now, the descent of thousands of Canadian truckers upon the capital city of Ottawa to confront Trudeau, a consistent theme has been the refusal to admit — not even to us, but to themselves — the numerical truth of what they’re dealing with.

Trudeau is becoming the ultimate example. Truckers last month began protesting a January 22nd rule that required the production of vaccine passports before crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. Canadian truckers are reportedly 90% vaccinated, above the country’s 78% total, a key detail that’s been brazenly ignored by media in both countries determined to depict these more as “anti-vax” than “anti-mandate” protests (which seem to be about many things at once, but that’s another story). When an angry convoy descended upon the capital, Trudeau dismissed them in a soliloquy that can only be described as inspired political arson:

    The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians…who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to ensure our rights, our freedoms, our values as a country.

A near-exact repeat of the “basket of deplorables” episode, Trudeau’s imperious description of “unacceptable” views instantly became a rallying cry, with people across the country lining the streets to cheer truckers while self-identifying as the “small fringe minority.” Everyone from high school kids to farmers and teachers and random marchers carrying jerrycans of fuel joined in as Trudeau’s own words were used to massively accelerate his troubles.

RTWT

28 Feb 2018

Justin Trudeau Needs Your Help

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27 Nov 2016

Trudeau Eulogies

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trudeau-idiot-castro

#TrudeauEulogies

trudeaueulogies1

trudeaueulogies2

And they go and on.

We mourn the death of Vlad the Impaler, who spearheaded initiatives which touched the hearts of millions.

We must mourn the death of Jeffrey Dahmer, whose hunger for human life was second to none.


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