About memory, honour and decency
Adrift and alone on a dark sea, we look to the night sky and scan the horizon for light.
After being scared away from Greenland by a small contingent of European soldiers sent to the Danish territory as a tripwire against the prospect of an American invasion, and after having made himself the laughing stock of Europe in Davos, President Donald Trump has turned his attention back to Canada.
The president is threatening new tariffs of 100 percent on all Canadian goods crossing the U.S.-Canada border. We’re expected to believe it’s got to do with Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Trump-replicating collusions in Beijing.
To add to the comedy-horror show, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is now offering Alberta separatists a “natural partner” in Washington. I can’t even work up the energy to deal with that today, except to admit my absolute contempt for Alberta separatism. It’s useful only as evidence that certain Canadians can be as ridiculous as the dumbest Americans.
I need to get this out of the way first.
As a Canadian, a civil tone is difficult to maintain in discussing American “trade policy” and “foreign policy” these days, but I do try. Real Story subscribers will know that it’s my tendency to avoid and sometimes dismiss hysterial reactions to President Trump’s persistent vulgarities and outrages.
After all, the man’s severe personality disorder requires him to situate himself always at the centre of attention, and whatever he says one day he may well say the opposite the next, and both statements are likely to be untrue. As a rule I find it all unutterably boring, and it’s not my job to catalogue Trump’s innumerable lies and illiteracies anyway. For that sort of thing I highly recommend the unerring Trump fact-checker Daniel Dale.
There are depravities to which no one may be permitted to sink, however, and I should right away disclose that a furious revulsion informs the way I’m dealing with the president’s remarks during his interview with Fox News at the closing of the World Economic Forum proceedings in Davos. He was referring to the soldiers of the NATO countries.
“We’ve never needed them,” President Trump said. “We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that. And they did. They stayed a little back, little off the front lines."
That was more than a mere lie.
There have been quite a few denunications across the board that capture my sentiments sufficiently. ‘Awful, despicable’: Canadian veterans slam Trump’s comments about NATO troops, and Trump leaves NATO allies “dumbfounded” and “disgusted” with remarks dismissing sacrifices in Afghanistan, and Trump Casually Denigrates NATO War Dead.
I confess as well that I have a personal cause to belabour the point. I spent a great deal of time inside and outside the wire in Afghanistan, and I was a partisan in the cause of a sovereign and democratic Afghan republic.
That was the cause for which 158 Canadian Forces members, a diplomat, four aid workers, a government contractor and the reporter Michelle Lang gave their lives. It wasn’t simply about coming to America’s aid by way of NATO’s Article 5.
Getting this out of the way properly, interested subscribers might want to turn to these links later:
My book about it all is Come From The Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan. Here’s an excerpt in the Ottawa Citizen: In Afghanistan, a city once greater than Babylon. A long-form essay in Dissent Magazine, first published in Democratiya: A Choice of Comrades.
My points about the joint Republican-Democrat surrender, capitulation and betrayal of the cause for which so many died: The West has abandoned Afghanistan to slavery: Nearly 90 per cent of Afghans have no sympathy at all for the Taliban.
For any paid subscribers with commenting privileges who may be inclined to weigh in along the lines of what lowbrow rightists always say, that Afghanistan was “not our fight,” or with what highbrow leftists always said was “not our war,” just don’t, please. Not today.
In Afghanistan, Americans, Canadians, Europeans and soldiers from several non-NATO countries put their shoulders to the wheel of a righteous cause. They were brothers and sisters in arms. That’s what’s worth remembering, and it’s worth remembering as well that after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, it was Canada that first suggested invoking NATO’s Article 5, the “all for one” clause.
Finally, for The Real Story’s American subscribers in particular: About President Trump’s many sordid betrayals of the cause of a sovereign and democratic Ukrainian republic, and the Trump family circle’s many ongoing collusions and connivances with Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, I’m with the author of The Divine Comedian: Ukraine’s Journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the Ukrainian writer Vickor Kravchuck.
We Will Never Mistake You for Him. “A note of solidarity for Americans who did not choose this: I want to say something with sadness, not anger. Sadness for the American people who wake up every day knowing that man is the president of their country. Sadness for what it means to see someone like that standing in front of a nation that has given so much to the world.
“This feeling is not to soften or to excuse anything, it is about refusing a dangerous mistake: The mistake of confusing a man with a country.”
To my Canadian subscribers: Let’s not make that mistake, okay? For too many generations, Americans have been our brothers and sisters. Most Americans are still our friends.
Now, back to the latest fresh hell. Be careful, though, because an inattentive reading might leave you all with the impression that I’m saying something complimentary about Donald Trump’s latest about-face on Mark Carney’s kowtowing before Xi Jinping in Beijing the other day. I’m not. It’s not “to soften or to excuse anything.”
So here we go. Buy your tickets here: