The Old is Dying. The New Cannot Be Born.
Atrocities in Ukraine, the deeper entrenchment of the world's police-state bloc, and morbidities from Brussels to Ottawa.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
I find that I keep returning to that observation as a useful way to understand the paralysis that has rendered liberal democracies like Canada so useless against the tide of state terror and repression that has been engulfing the world over the past decade or so.
It’s from Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks. Gramsci was jailed by Fascist Italy in 1926 and died behind bars in 1937. A dissident Marxist, Gramsci was something of a savant, and despite certain eccentric notions his writing continues to command admirers from across the political spectrum owing to the appeal of its “energy and erudition,” as the Economist puts it.
But I’m not here to write about Gramsci. That’s not what this edition of the Real Story was supposed to be about.
I suppose I could carry on about the similarities you could draw between the particular period in the trajectory of Europe’s industrialized barbarism that Gramsci observed, and the current interregnum that led inexorably to those corpse-strewn streets in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, just an hour’s drive from Kyiv.
After all, it was the League of Nations’ dithering over imposing sanctions on Fascist Italy that allowed Mussolini to get away with his war of conquest in Abyssinia. The League took all the requisite umbrage with Italy for its bombing of Ethiopians with canisters of mustard sulphur gas, and discussions did get quite heated in the League’s proceedings under the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare. A lot like the proceedings under the auspices of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in the matter of Bashar Assad’s Kremlin-backed mass murders by sarin and chlorine gas in Syria.
Anyway, Mussolini was permitted to cement his relations with the Third Reich and the next thing you know the entire world is at war. Such were the “morbid symptoms” in the interregnum between the old order and what might have been a new one back then, were it not for the path those morbities cleared for the Hitler-Stalin pact, the Holocaust, and a bloody sundering of humanity that carried off at least 70 million lives before it was over.
Speaking of which, I’m off to Montreal this coming week to give a talk at Vanier College’s 30th annual symposium on the Holocaust and Genocide, then I’ll be in Ottawa for a few days. I’m on an assignment from the National Post that may leave me little time to file my usual columns to the Post or to the Ottawa Citizen for the next little while, but we’ll see. In any event, I’ll keep subscribers posted, and if you don’t already subscribe you should. For the deeper backstory you’ll ant to be a paying customer (only $5 a month). In any case, subscribe. Easily done, just click this link.
So, among the morbid symptoms of the current moment: China remains unbothered by the sanctions the NATO capitals have levied against Moscow, and the EU and China convened a “summit” this past week that was so uneventful that it barely warranted mention in the news pages. This matters. Or at least it should matter. Xi Jinping is getting away with insuring Vladimir Putin against what’s coming to him by means of banking services, diplomatic cover at the United Nations Security Council and a new 30-year contract to buy $117.5 billion in Russian oil and gas, to be paid in Euros. For starters.
But just as Russian oligarchs are deeply embedded in London real estate and high society, China’s corporate entities are deeply embedded in trade relations with countries like Canada, where Beijing’s political connections are well advanced, so there we are. Before the unspeakable atrocities in Bucha were revealed this weekend, that was going to be the subject of this column.
I was going to write about the greasiness of Senators Victor Oh and Yuen Pau Woo and their persistent attacks on the character and reputation of former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu - whose defeat in last year’s federal election was in no small measure the result of a Beijing-inspired disinformation campaign. I was going to write about last week’s efforts of Senator Lou Housakos to push through a law that would make it more difficult for Beijing’s friends in high places to exert their sordid influences in Canada.
I will come to that, a bit later, and yes, Conservative leadership hopeful Jean Charest figures into it. It was well-connected characters like Charest that the Conservatives initially had in mind when they first attempted to establish a foreign-influence registry in Canada.
About the sanctions that the NATO capitals have imposed on Moscow over Putin’s total war of conquest in Abyssinia (sorry, meant to write “Ukraine” there), Wang Lutong, Beijing’s director-general of European affairs, explains that China is doing the world a favour by ignoring them completely. "We oppose sanctions,” he says, because efforts to curtail the Kremlin’s war chest “risk spilling to the rest of the world, leading to wars of the currency, wars of trade and finance and also risk jeopardizing the supply chain and industrial chain and globalization and even the economic order."
As if that would be such a bad thing. Here’s China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, just this past Wednesday, at the conclusion of a cordial meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov: "Both sides are more determined to develop bilateral ties, and are more confident in promoting cooperation in various fields. China is willing to work with Russia to take China-Russian ties to a higher level in a new era under the guidance of the consensus reached by the heads of state."
A “higher level in a new era” it would certainly be: the complete destruction of the “liberal rules-based international order,” which wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster except that it means its replacement with the global tyranny described in the manifesto Putin and Xi co-authored only a few weeks ago.
It would be an era cemented in a Chinese-Russian relationship with “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation,” wholly untroubled by UN sanctions in response to genocide. Or by EU sanctions in response to the invasion and obliteration of a European democracy. Or by G7 sanctions responding to any outrage against the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the type Myanmar’s military junta continues to carry out, with impunity. Just last Friday, Beijing pledged total support for the generals. “No matter how the situation changes, China will support Myanmar,” the Rohingyas’ genocidaires were assured.
That’s the new era Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron spent seven years preparing to accommodate in a 27-nation trade agreement with China, a particularly debilitating morbid symptom that the European Parliament treated with a 599-30 vote to freeze the thing last year. A close call.
I highly recommend this Harvard International Review analysis written by three actual experts who know what they’re talking about. Long story short: “With the endorsement of China, the Russian leader is now waging a relentless war against the Ukrainian people. . .Without a doubt, Ukraine will not be the last victim.”
So it’s up to the European governments and their NATO allies to properly bring the hammer down on the Kremlin, right? One would hope. Following a two-week citizens’ border blockade that closed several crossings between Poland and Belarus last month, the governments of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia agreed that it was time to consider blocking all trade with Russia by land and sea. The European Commission, along with Germany, France and Austria, aren’t ready to be quite so insolent with Mr. Putin.
This week, owing to the scenes from suburban Kyiv - the bodies of civilians strewn about with their hands tied behind their backs, the multiple reports from several reputable news organizations of rapes and beheadings, eyewitness accounts of Russian soldiers summarily executing old men riding their bicycles - the citizens of the liberal democracies have clearly had quite enough of their governments’ half-measures. Our governments are giving every appearance of responding appropriately.
Germany has just expelled 40 Russian diplomats. Even France’s Macron is coming around, or at least putting up a good show of it. “What happened in Bucha requires a new round of sanctions,” Macron says. “Already on coal and oil, which we know would be particularly painful, we can act.”
British foreign Secretary Liz Truss says it’s time for more sanctions and the NATO countries should take measures “banning Russian ships from our ports, cracking down on Russian banks, going after new industries filling Putin’s war chest like gold, and agreeing a clear timetable to eliminate our imports of Russian oil, gas and coal.”
Our own foreign affairs minister, Mélanie Joly, reiterated Canada’s call for the International Criminal Court to proceed with war crimes charges. U.S. President Joe Biden is saying the same, and proposing that the UN General Assembly vote on removing Russia from the UN’s Human Rights Council.
All to the good, as mostly issues-management initiatives that anticipate the usual peacetime “world stage” activity. You might be surprised to learn that Russian ships have not been totally banned from NATO ports, or that Europe is still importing Russian gas, or that several Russian institutions were exempted from the G7’s expulsion of Russian banks from the international SWIFT system last month.
Don’t be surprised. These are only the more obviously morbid symptoms in the interregnum between the old order and whatever fresh hell is awaiting us all if we carry on in these ways.
Also over the weekend: the populist pro-Kremlin Aleksandar Vučić was relected president of Serbia, buoyed by a beneficial gas price from Moscow, Chinese infrastructure loans exceeding 8 billion euros, the promise of a Beijing-Belgrade free trade agreement, and facial-recognition services provided by Huawei - we’ll come to Huawei in a bit - to identify protesters at anti-government rallies. In Hungary - China’s closest European ally - the pro-Kremlin populist Victor Orban was re-elected to a fourth term. Orban has proved quite useful to Beijing. Because the European Union requires unanimity on foreign-policy votes, Orban has blocked European efforts to cancel extradition treaties with China over Beijing’s evisceration of democracy in Hong Kong.
Morbid symptoms of this very kind were making themselves evident in Canada’s Senate last week, with Senator Victor Oh callng Kenny Chiu a liar, and Senator Yuen Pau Woo absurdly invoking the hysterical spectre of innocent Mahjongg hobbyists getting caught up in Senator Housakos’ attempts to revive Chiu’s foreign-influence law. Chiu put it before the House of Commons before Parliament was dissolved for last year’s pointless federal election.
A quick word about Senator Oh: It was only two years ago that the Conservative Oh was found to have breached the Senate’s ethics code four times in an all-expenses paid trip to China that he’d misled Housakos about, and Oh was further found to have withheld information from the Senate investigation and to have deliberately misled the investigation. As for the Liberal Woo, let’s just say that his shamelessness is without bounds, and he’s always been that way, and it’s why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saw to his appointment. I’ll leave the verdict to the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project: “Mr. Yuen Pau Woo has been acting as a spokesperson for China rather than for Canada. Yuen Pau Woo should have no place in the Canadian Senate.”
Now, before you write off last week’s Senate rumpus as merely some backstairs Conservative unpleasantness owing to some advantage that might be given to, say, party leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre, you should bear in mind that a foreign-influence registry was Conservative policy well before the party leadership was even a gleam in Poilievre’s eye.
And the move to establish a statutory foreign-influence instrument to mirror the federal lobbyists’ registry is a response to repeated warnings from Canada’s intelligence agencies. A serious country would take this stuff seriously. Only the most recent warning came from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service a couple of months ago about efforts by China and its Canadian agents of influence to “covertly cultivate relations with elected officials to gain sway over parliamentary debates and government decision-making.”
Here’s what Housakos told me about last week’s eruptions in the Senate: “I’m disappointed that Senator Oh and Senator Woo don’t recognize the inherent danger in what the Chinese regime is doing in our country, and how they’re using compromised individuals and people in positions of authority to carry water of the Chinese regime.”
Housakos pointed out that long before the Conservative leadership was even a gleam in the eye of Jean Charest - who has now emerged as the presentable, moderate Conservative candidate preferred by polite society - Charest’s name was already coming up as an example of why just such a registry was necessary: “This is a case in point where we have officials who were in a position of authority, a former premier of the second largest province in our country, and not just any premier - he’s a former deputy prime minister a former senior minister of the federal government - who has basically been for hire working for Huawei over the past several years, on the payroll,” Housakos told me.
That would be Huawei, Xi Jinping’s “national champion” telecom giant, which has been covering up the central role it plays in the maintenance of Beijing’s surveillance state, particular in its tracking and shadowing of Xinjiang’s brutally persecuted Ughur people.
Housakos notes that Charest has now been caught misleading Conservative party members, the news media and the public about what he’s been doing for Huawei all this time, and he’s not being held accountable for it. “This calls into question the relationship between Mr. Charest and Huawei. Clearly he worked for them for a number of years, and Huawei has publicly confirmed that he did not do what he claimed publicly he did for them.” Charest certainly wasn’t retained by Huawei to help free Michael Kovrig or Michael Spavor, and he wasn’t even retained to work on the extradition case involving Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei chief executive officer whose detention prompted Beijing to kidnap the Michaels in the first place.
“At the end of the day we can’t find Charest’s name on any lobbying registry. He worked for [Huawei], according to them, to represent them in accordance to their 5G work.” Much to the consternation of CSIS and U.S. intelligence agencies, Canada remains alone in the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing partnership in failing to bar Huawei from Canada’s core fifth-generation (5G) internet system.
“So this is a case in point, where this bill would obligate individuals like Mr. Charest, if he had tried to talk to any officials, politicians or government officials, that he would have to disclose what exactly was he doing and who was he doing it for. All this is very murky and very disturbing, and this is something he hasn’t adequately addressed.
“Quite frankly, if he wants to serve in the highest office in this land, he needs to come clean with what he billed, how long he billed for, and what exactly he did for all that money. This is the kind of stuff in this country that has to stop.”