Canadian police and liberal politicians protest against themselves, as America teeters on the edge of fascism
Photo Credit: (CNN / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
I teach for a living, and most of my students are new Canadians. So they’re always interested to learn about Canada, the subtler aspects of life here. If life in a country can be said to have themes, they wonder what are the recurring questions and issues that Canadians encounter. They want to start thinking those problems through too, alongside the rest of us.
One theme in Canadian life is this: As Canadians, we always inescapably face the problem of how to deal with the Americans.
For the Public, A Unique Conflict
Canada is a small country compared to the United States in population, economic power, military might, geopolitical influence, and swagger. So a perennial guiding principle of Canadian leaders has been to build good relationships with the United States. That has meant policy of, on one hand, pursuing enthusiastic alliance, or on the other hand, being a friendly neighbour of which no one in the White House ever need concern themselves.
If I can describe those policies more critically, acting the lapdog, or working and praying very hard never to be noticed. If I’m stuck with only those choices, I’d be hiding out with a joint in the far upper room of the party, hoping that loud jerk downstairs doesn’t find out that I’m here.
I don’t want Canadians to be faced with only those choices. I doubt you, my readers, do either. So we face the question: How to make another path forward?
Deep Meaning in Silence and Confusion
Since Trump’s election, Prime Minister Trudeau has wisely pursued the friendly neighbour strategy, even up through the COVID crisis. His government has pursued a reasonable set of policies, supported similarly sensible actions throughout provinces and cities, and has responded productively to calls from the public and New Democratic Party to close the loopholes and gaps in their pandemic support programs. He and his diplomats in the USA have politely suggested keeping borders closed to non-essential travel, as a matter of caution, of course.
That diplomatic strategy risks falling to pieces now that Donald Trump is leading the mass mobilization of all divisions of the United States military to suppress aggressively the country’s ongoing protests for racial justice. Canadians cannot ignore the intensity – face it, the horror – of the military and police crackdown in which thousands have been arbitrarily arrested, tens of thousands brutalized, many hundreds wounded, and some killed.
Trudeau’s reaction was literally silence.
Silence was not the Canadian Prime Minister’s official reaction. Officially, that was to kneel with protestors in a symbolic gesture of solidarity. Such a gesture may have played well among the comfortable Liberal Party base, but certainly not among we progressives. We saw the same empty image-making as in Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders’ kneeling gesture, a condescending effort to cover up a leader’s dedication to maintaining actively a racist status quo. On a positive note though, Saunders recently announced his resignation, officially happening on July 31. Throughout the American protests, police officers kneel with protesters as an even worse insult to their cause: to lull people into a false sense of security before bringing the brutality.
Our Prime Minister’s awkward silence spoke far louder. Even activist legend Al Sharpton knew to give a Radio-Canada reporter a well-deserved remark at Trudeau’s expense. Yet any Canadian has felt the same embarrassment as Trudeau on many occasions, when an American colleague’s stereotypical bluster has left us with only with blank stares for anyone who might empathize with our mess.
At the Foundation of Morality Is a Howl
The sight of George Floyd’s murder is more than disgusting. His pained, tortured face, his strained calls of “Mama!” piercing through his murderer’s laughter: it calls to our deepest social instincts of love in the face of death. To watch a person be murdered with the indignity of a policeman’s knee on their neck is to have the very possibility of ethics in human nature yank you onto the street, whether physically or in your feeds.
This is an involuntary ethical paroxysm, an affect equally physical, mental, and social. Such righteous indignation of the biggest crowds and the loneliest voices is a volcanic reflex action. The protests themselves are larger, more forceful, even because of the scale of military violence that Trump has unleashed on the American people. As the intensity and energy of oppressive forces grow, that pressure makes resistance glow hotter, larger, and longer.
Enough to melt the steel of a rifle barrel.
The shared thrust among millions to push for justice emerges from human nature. I do not mean this in a universal or religious sense, but physical and evolutionary. Humans can develop their brains in a complete manner only through social connection and robust relationships of love and care.
That growth through connection and love binds human subjects in society, and we seek out relationships and activities that will strengthen our powers, just as love has always done since birth. The possibility condition for justice is itself in the whole structure of the human body, which includes mind and society.
People like Trump, the Christian extremists who support him, and the violent people who happily march to his orders with guns and pepper spray in hand, are in an important ethical sense broken. They have been socialized into ideologies and habits of thinking that shatter the possibility of love.
Broken People Confuse Love With Hate
Police cultures train their members to relish the adrenaline of violence in many forms, and dehumanize those they surveil and control. It is just as you would expect a culture descended from slave patrols. Christian extremists have blended the racist nationalism of Western culture with an apocalyptic ideology, whose standards for behaviour and thought constitute their only acceptable morality.
These two cultures, united in their racism and worship of military violence against enemies, are the backbone and the shock troops of the Republican Party, and have since the American reaction to the end of Jim Crow began.
In the face of all this, we progressives set ourselves the often impossible task of healing the world. We progressives want to take apart the systems that condition our relationships with violence and exploitation, and instead build systems that encourage love and shared solidarity.
As Canadians, we stand outside the worst of the fascist politics of the United States. But we also all stand in its cultural, economic, and military shadow. If an even-more-emboldened President Trump ever decides to use American military might to force his reluctant northern ally to follow the line, we would be completely unable to defend ourselves.
This was never a very big problem until our generation. It was no hypocrisy for the Harper government to send Indigenous communities, for example, nothing but body bags to handle the H1N1 flu outbreak. Liberal Party Prime Ministers as recent as Jean Chrétien spent their careers advocating the erasure and extinction of Indigenous culture. Most Canadians have long considered it necessary to prevent the immigration of Asians and Africans. Discrimination, racism, and violence against black Canadians is common across the country.
Canada was founded for whites exclusively, and it was only with the new constitution of 1982 that any reliable legal protections for different kinds of people existed in our country.
When the Pressure Is Too High to Do Right
If Justin Trudeau did not have the public image that he has cultivated all his life, he would have no problem turning a blind eye or endorsing the American crackdown on protesters wishing an end to state violence. He and the Liberal Party have positioned themselves as among the last defenders of liberal democracy on Earth. So he cannot stay silent as Trump turns the military against American cities and people. Yet he also cannot risk the safety of Canada and Canadians by provoking Trump to see us, and see us with anger in his eyes.
Donald Trump is not afraid to kill. Justin Trudeau, like all sensible Canadians, is right to be terrified of Donald Trump. Yet we can’t help but hear the howls.
To read more deeply about the philosophical tradition and works that inform this column, look to Martin Buber’s I and Thou, Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, and Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity.
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