Saturday Commentary and Review #180

Why Populism Continues to Rise, Degraded Hezbollah, Germany's Failed "Feminist Foreign Policy", Canadian Native Bands Do Business With China, Hunter S. Thompson

Nov 30, 2024

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

When my very poorly-educated uncles washed ashore in North America in the 1950s, they managed to find steady blue collar employment that was secure and that paid well. They worked at the same company until they retired, safe in the knowledge that their pensions would deliver them a continued good standard of living. Their wives (even less educated than they were, if at all) never had to work. They stayed home to raise their children, all of whom went on to complete post-secondary education and join the middle class.

When my Aunts and Uncles landed in Canada in the 1960s, jobs were still plenty for the poorly-educated. They too managed to secure an excellent standard of living for themselves and their children, especially when compared to the land that they emigrated from. For those of us who arrived in the 1970s, the only real change was that women too had to work. My mother, aunts, etc. all ended up working on factory floors, secure in the knowledge that if they worked hard, they too could live well and catapult their kids into a higher standard of living.

Something broke later on; it didn’t happen all at once, but these kinds of jobs began to depart for places like Mexico and China. These earlier generations were already moving into retirement (if not already retired), with Boomers still at work. It was fine, because their children were educated and didn’t need to work blue collar jobs. Those still at work on the factory floor saw how their kind of work was no longer secure, with offshoring, temporary employment, benefit-stripping, etc. starting to take hold, all in the name of “being competitive in a global business environment”. If you were a white collar worker, you were still doing pretty well.

This is no longer a certainty in the West, though. Much of the white collar middle class is now part of the “precariat”; a cohort that lacks job security, suffers from the price inflation of everything, and is always in danger of downward economic (and therefore social) mobility. The middle class today is highly educated, much more educated than their parents were, but struggle to maintain the same living standards that their less educated and less qualified blue collar parents provided to them.

Central to the social contract of liberal democracy is the promise that our lives would continue to get better, so long as we kept faith in the system. This contract has broken down, with the 2008 economic crisis and especially the COVID-19 lockdown era being the two most illustrative examples. Younger generations are largely locked out of the real estate market, entry to which was taken for granted even by Generation X. This overall decline has negatively impacted the perceived legitimacy of the state, and has greatly reduced the faith that people have in their respective national elites. The betrayal felt by the middle class in particular has arisen for too many reasons to list here. Suffice it to say that it has been the main reason as to why populism has taken off all across the West. Populism is the democratic reaction to the failure of the ruling elites.

This populist backlash has largely been located on the political right in the West, despite it sharing common ground with the old left when it comes to issues such as economics. Strangely, the left-of-centre has all but rejected this current wave of populism, tying its mast to globalism, elite managerialism (and reliance on “experts”), eschewing traditional labour-focused politics in favour of trendy social mores. This has not gone unnoticed, with old left types such as German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck continuing to hammer home how social democrats have abandoned and betrayed the working class that they once centered their politics around. Streeck is no stranger to the readers of this Substack, and I am very happy not just because he has been profiled in the New York Times, but because this profile has been written by another favourite of this site, Christopher Caldwell:

In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in The New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.
Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Streeck (whose name rhymes with “cake”) argues that today’s contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, he reminds us, working classes in Western countries won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, of course, but that was in the nature of what Mr. Streeck calls the “postwar settlement.” What economies lost in dynamism, they gained in social stability.

What has changed since that golden era?

But starting in the 1970s, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.
That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: “the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital.” They never broke the habit.
Very quickly their policies sparked inflation. Investors balked again. It took a painful tightening of money to stabilize prices. Ronald Reagan’s supply-side regime eased the pain a bit, but only by running record government deficits. Bill Clinton was able to eliminate these, but only by deregulating private banking and borrowing, Mr. Streeck shows. In other words, the dangerous debt exposure was shifted out of the Treasury and into the bank accounts of middle-class and working-class households. This led, eventually, to the financial crisis of 2008.
As Mr. Streeck sees it, a series of (mostly American) attempts to calm the economy after the ’70s produced the system we now call neoliberalism. “Neoliberalism,” he argues, “was, above all, a political-economic project to end the inflation state and free capital from its imprisonment in the postwar settlement.” This project has never really been reconsidered, even as one administration’s fix turns into the next generation’s crisis.

To Streeck, democracy and globalism cannot co-exist as the latter demands uniformity, while the former insists on localized nuances to permit sovereignty.

Managerialism and the over-reliance on the expert class:

At each stage of neoliberalism’s evolution, Mr. Streeck stresses, key decisions have been made by technocrats, experts and other actors relatively insulated from democratic accountability. When the crash came in 2008, central bankers stepped in to take over the economy, devising quantitative easing and other novel methods of generating liquidity. During the Covid emergency of 2020 and 2021, Western countries turned into full-blown expertocracies, bypassing democracy outright. A minuscule class of administrators issued mandates on every aspect of national life — masks, vaccinations, travel, education, church openings — and incurred debt at levels that even the most profligate Reaganite would have considered surreal.

The internal paradox:

Mr. Streeck has a clear vision of something paradoxical about the neoliberal project: For the global economy to be “free,” it must be constrained. What the proponents of neoliberalism mean by a free market is a deregulated market. But getting to deregulation is trickier than it looks because in free societies, regulations are the result of people’s sovereign right to make their own rules. The more democratic the world’s societies are, the more idiosyncratic they will be, and the more their economic rules will diverge. But that is exactly what businesses cannot tolerate — at least not under globalization. Money and goods must be able to move frictionlessly and efficiently across borders. This requires a uniform set of laws. Somehow, democracy is going to have to give way.
A uniform set of laws also requires a single international norm. Which norm? That’s another problem, as Mr. Streeck sees it: The global regime we have is a reliable copy of the American one. This brings order and efficiency but also tilts the playing field in favor of American corporations, banks and investors.

Populism as a “tendency towards deglobalization”:

As we no longer have an economic policy that is managed democratically, it should not be surprising that it produces unfair outcomes. Nor should it be surprising that in the wake of the mortgage crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine and so-called Bidenflation, this unfairness would give rise to what Mr. Streeck calls “tendencies toward deglobalization” — such as those that emerged with a vengeance on Nov. 5.
The “global economy” is a place where common people have no leverage. Parties of the left lost sight of such problems after the 1970s, Mr. Streeck notes. They allowed their old structure, oriented around industrial workers and primarily concerned with workers’ rights and living standards, to be infiltrated and overthrown by intellectuals, who were primarily concerned with promoting systems of values, such as human rights and lately the set of principles known as wokeism.

….and a reaction to the abandonment of the working classes.

The “weaponization” of everything to stem the rising populist tide:

This new, topsy-turvy idea of democracy comes with a new political strategy. The interests and agendas of standard-issue parties are increasingly reinforced by the media and other grandees of globalization. These actors have “fought against the new wave of politicization,” Mr. Streeck writes, “with the full arsenal of instruments at their disposal — propagandistic, cultural, legal, institutional.”
Mr. Streeck is probably referring here to the obstacles put in the way of so-called left-wing movements in Europe — Syriza, Podemos, La France Insoumise in France. But his observation applies just as well to so-called right-wing parties. At present, Marine Le Pen, whose party won the most votes in France’s national elections last summer, is standing trial for embezzlement before a court that may ban her from politics for five years. In Germany this month, more than a hundred members of the Bundestag requested a constitutional ban on the country’s fast-growing right-wing party the Alternative for Germany, ahead of national elections scheduled for February.
There are dangers, too, in the way partisan prosecutors, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, convicted Mr. Trump of 34 felonies involving bookkeeping, on a legal theory so novel that not one American in a thousand could explain what he had been convicted of. A majority of Americans effectively voided the conviction at the ballot box.

Streeck remains a creature of the soc-dem left, but his critiques are finding much more support on the right these days. The best example of this is how Americans chose to reject newer forms of identity politics, opting instead for a positive vision that they hope will provide relief for the precarious nature of their lives at present.

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As I type this out on my laptop, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida is overrunning the city of Aleppo and moving south towards Homs and Hama. They are in the fourth day of their lightning offensive in which they have struck out from Idlib Province, taking the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and Russian forces by surprise. This is a tragedy in the making, with massacres of innocent civilians very likely to result from it. I hope that this offensive can be stopped, and these jihadis forced back into the pocket that they escaped from.

A big reason why this offensive is succeeding is that the Syrian Government has been stripped of one of its most important allies: Hezbollah. This Shi’ite force from Lebanon played a critical role in defending Syria from al-Qaida, ISIS, and other jihadi outfits during the country’s recent civil war. Hezbollah’s decision to enter the Israeli-Hamas conflict on the side of the latter meant that they had to redeploy their forces to face the IDF.

In 2006, Hezbollah scored an important victory against the Israelis in Southern Lebanon. The IDF was taken by surprise by the Hezbollah defense, rendering it unable to gain even a tiny foothold on Lebanese soil. The Israelis were embarrassed, and Hezbollah was widely feted, its reputation burnished. The successes that it counted in Syria a decade later only elevated the respect already accorded to it.

Everyone knew that 2006 was no the last time that Hezbollah and the IDF would fight, as another war between the two was inevitable. The current conflict that was sparked by Hamas’ audacious raid on Israel saw a low-level tit-for-tat fight between Hezbollah and Israel. Israelis living in the north of the country were forced to move out due to Hezbollah shelling, a retaliation conducted against Israel for its actions against Hamas in Gaza. For an entire year, no one seemed to want to escalate the conflict….until the Israelis finally decided to take the fight to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. Its leader, Nasrallah, was killed in a targeted strike. Its entire senior leadership was also eliminated, as was its communications network. Many of its arms depots have been blasted to smithereens. The IDF crossed over into Southern Lebanon, attempting to reach the Litani River, and thus ensure the safety of the north of Israel, a condition required for its citizens to return.

The Israelis have met with fierce resistance on the ground and have only achieved limited tactical successes…but when combined with the elimination of its senior leadership, the destruction of much of its weaponry, the decimation of many towns and villages in the Shi’ite heartland, Hezbollah chose to sue for peace….a peace that does not involve Hamas and Gaza. It is a separate peace, something that Hezbollah stated that it would not even consider until recently.

Will this ceasefire hold? I have no idea. What I do know is that Hezbollah has been severely mauled by the IDF, but not entirely defeated. It needs to lick its wounds, regroup, re-arm, and most of all, repair its reputation with its base and with the wider Arab world. Hezbollah talked a big game during this conflict, with some of their more excitable supporters bragging about “500,000 missiles attacking Israel” or “Hezbollah units crossing the border into Galilee”. Hezbollah did not fare well, but it will be back, and it will live to fight the IDF for another day.

Some Hezbollah supporters and apologists are daring to declare victory, making a fool out of themselves. This is no victory:

When Palestinian forces left Beirut in 1982, forced out by the Israelis, they flashed victory signs on the trucks carrying them to the city’s port. This later led the Palestine Liberation Organization official Issam Sartawi to remark that, with more victories like the one in Lebanon, the PLO would soon find itself in the Fiji islands.
That memory came to mind while I examined the front page of the pro-Hezbollah daily Al-Akhbar on the day the ceasefire in Lebanon took hold. The paper’s headline read, “Steadfast, Victorious.” Even assuming that one is unthinkingly devoted to a Hezbollah view of the world, to believe that the party’s thirteen-month war with Israel constitutes in any way a victory is so delusional that it must actually be reassuring to Hezbollah’s foes. Only a party deeply anxious about the potential domestic backlash against the senseless conflict it provoked would be capable of passing off a historical cataclysm as a success.

The author of this analysis is clearly biased, so proceed with caution.

“Close to a surrender”:

The conditions of the ceasefire agreement effectively laid out what was not far from a surrender for Hezbollah, but the party and Iran accepted it, more or less showing that they were willing to live with its implications. This tells us something.
The major issue of contention was Israel’s demand that it be allowed to intervene militarily inside Lebanon if Hezbollah violated the ceasefire agreement. The Lebanese were blindsided by a U.S.-Israeli side letter that granted Israel the freedom to engage in such military action, regardless of what Lebanon, Hezbollah, or Iran preferred.

The crux of the issue and saving face:

The person who understood what was going down was Lebanon’s parliament speaker Nabih Berri. One can say many things about Berri, but not that he’s a fool. The speaker must have quickly grasped that the systematic destruction of the Shia community was a threat to his own political survival. That’s why he went out on a limb in early October, along with caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati and the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, to support a ceasefire agreement and commit to “implementing Security Council Resolution 1701 and to deploying the army south of the Litani River.” This decision earned Berri a disapproving visit from Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqji, who reportedly was unhappy with Berri’s acceptance of Resolution 1701. This prompted a sour Joumblatt to state a few days later, “A certain visitor to Lebanon wants to give us lessons in resistance. We are the ones who can give him those lessons, not the other way around. We have a rich history in this field.”
What this points to is that, from the start, Berri sought an accord with the U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein, whatever the price. When he saw that the Americans and Israelis had concluded their side agreement, he added a formulation to the ceasefire deal that essentially accepted what this side agreement sought to impose. Berri suggested that the ceasefire plan grant both sides a right to self-defense, which is how the Israelis view their freedom of action in Lebanon. What did the Lebanese gain from this? First, they saved face, allowing Berri to relativize accusations that the ceasefire proposal infringed Lebanese sovereignty. Second, he bought Hezbollah a potential right of response to Israeli actions, also under the rubric of self-defense.

Why did Hezbollah agree to this deal?

Up to the eve of the ceasefire, Hezbollah was facing an increasingly difficult situation, which the party’s launching of over 200 rockets against Israel on November 24 sought to conceal. The party was about to lose Khiyam in the eastern sector of border area, where Israeli forces were said to have reached the Litani River, and it was facing an Israeli push in Bayada in the western sector, which potentially could have opened up the road to Tyre. While Hezbollah was resisting, there seemed to be no coordinated opposition on its part, so it was only a matter of time before the Israelis would envelop its combatants south of the Litani. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country, Shiite society had been thoroughly dislocated as the Israelis expanded their bombings of major towns and population centers.

The author lays out the tasks at hand for Hezbollah:

Its priority will be to revive its community, rebuild decimated Shiite areas, and find an acceptable relationship with the Lebanese state and the other religious communities, while preserving as much of its power as possible.
More importantly, Hezbollah is now facing a Lebanese society far less willing to accept its hegemony than ever before. Relations between the country’s sects and the party have deteriorated in the past five years, consequently this internal struggle could lead to further stalemate and tensions, or it may lead to some sort of dialogue with the party on everything from surrendering it weapons to doing so in exchange for obtaining a greater share of political power in the state. But we seem to have reached the limits of the formulation Hezbollah imposed on successive governments, namely the triptych of the Army, the People, and the Resistance. Henceforth, many non-Shiite political representatives will refuse to include the resistance in that equation.

I am not so certain of this analysis, as Hezbollah requires both “the Armalite and the ballot box” to secure the existence of its community. Voluntary disarmament would leave its Southern Lebanese heartland prone to attack from Israel, and possibly others.

Hezbollah’s efforts to spin its latest communal calamity as a victory are a sign of things to come. The party will not give anything up if it can help it, but that means ignoring the context in which it finds itself. The Lebanese army can be expected to implement its mandate in an expansive way, now that it enjoys both popular and political cover. For Hezbollah to try to return to what it had prior to October 2023 would require it to enter into a confrontation with the Lebanese state, army, and most political parties in the country, isolating it further. With Israel just over the horizon waiting to intercede militarily against any effort by Hezbollah to return its heavy weapons to the south, Hezbollah could well find itself caught up again in a new war in which it stands alone against all. This may be the stuff of heroic narratives, but it is also a path toward communal debilitation.

I think that this overestimates how much power the Lebanese Army can project. Lebanon after all is a failed state.

Lastly:

So, the claims of victory we are hearing from some Lebanese are, ultimately, pitiful. In the end, Lebanon is and will alas remain a nation of pawns, of gambling chips, in a wider regional and international power game. Today, many in the country’s south, the Beqaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs have lost everything, but for what purpose? To be Iranian sandbags against Israel so that Iran itself can be protected? To see the Americans and Israelis make backchannel arrangements at their expense? Where can one see any victory here?

This is an appeal to isolate Hezbollah, and to thereby effectively evict Iranian influence from the Levant. A bruised Hezbollah is, in my opinion, still a potent force that will be tough to politically neutralize, and physically dislodge.

In 2014, Sweden announced that it would pursue “the world’s first feminist foreign policy”. This experiment came crashing down a few months later when the Swedish government relented on its stated policy and permitted the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia due to pressure from Swedish and EU business interests. Swedish feminism crashed into the brick wall of reality.

Swedish politics have changed quite a lot since then, veering back to the centre (and somewhat to the centre-right), with the country no longer being the flag-bearer of contemporary elitist liberalism. The failure of its feminist foreign policy might have served as a lesson to some, but it also became an inspiration to others despite it being a debacle. Naturally, the worst political party in Europe, the German Greens, took one look at the Swedish example and decided that they too would pursue a similar policy even though it had no history of success. Not to worry, as they would succeed where the Swedes failed!

At present, the German coalition government (of which the Greens are a part) is being savaged by liberals and the left for its public support of Israel, making a mockery of its feminist pretensions:

Last year, Germany’s Foreign Office spelled out guidelines for a “feminist” foreign policy, focused on defending marginalized women. Today in Gaza, this same ministry is arming the deadliest war on women and girls this century.

Keep in mind that this is from Jacobin, a Marxist publication.

On October 21, the international research organization responsible for the development of the concept, the Center for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP), along with the human rights NGO HÁWAR.help, hosted a press conference on the topic “preventing femicides, legalizing abortions.” German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, of the Green Party, took center stage at the conference, along with other high-profile women from the worlds of politics and culture.
These sorts of demands are the lowest common denominator of all feminist movements — and yet hostility was stirring both inside and outside the event, mainly due to Baerbock’s presence. Someone in the audience stood up in protest and shouted, “Stop the genocide of Palestinian women!” and was eventually removed by security. Outside the conference, women protested with signs reading, for example, “Women’s rights shouldn’t mean white privilege.”
The images and videos from the conference and the associated protests have trigged strong responses on social media: the founders of the CFFP were accused of “white feminism,” and prominent international feminists have since resigned from the organization’s advisory board.

This event being a circular firing squad should surprise no one, as “purity spirals” are par for the course with that crowd.

The accusation:

This debate has brought to the surface an issue that has been simmering for some time: even though the German Foreign Office claims in its guidelines for a feminist foreign policy to “focus on the rights, representation and resources of women and marginalized groups,” in practice it undermines exactly those rights. In practice, feminist foreign policy is simply meant to give the German government a progressive veneer. The fact that ultimately there is nothing feminist about Baerbock’s policy is made perfectly clear by her policy toward Gaza.

The details:

It is true that Baerbock has a clear profile and legitimate claim to feminist credentials on this [abortion -ed.] issue. But she can only be considered a feminist in general if you choose to completely ignore her actions in her own ministry.
After the United States, Germany is Israel’s most important arms supplier. Between August and October 2024, Germany approved more than €94 million worth of arms deliveries to Israel. The foreign minister’s near unconditional support for Israel, even when its army attacks schools and other civilian infrastructure, was made clear when she falsely claimed last month that “civilian sites could lose their protected status [under international law] if terrorists abuse this status.”
Baerbock’s words are completely at odds with the reality on the ground in Gaza and Lebanon. A UN report released just a few weeks ago has stated that it could now take 350 years to rebuild Gaza if the coastal strip remains under blockade. In Gaza, more than half a million women are affected by food insecurity, and 175,000 are exposed to life-threatening health risks. In no other conflict in the last two decades have as many women and girls been killed in just one year as in Gaza. If these facts aren’t clear enough, even the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) has recently begun taking legal action against German’s arms deliveries to Israel.
In 2023, Germany’s “center-left” governing coalition set a record for arms exports, and this year it could be exceeded again. Besides Israel, these weapons are being sent to countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, showing that rhetoric about “the fight against Islamism” in the name of protecting women’s rights doesn’t have to be taken too seriously if and when it upsets Germany’s geopolitical and financial interests. The weapons sent to Turkey are also being used, among other things, to crush the Kurdish liberation movement and thus the women’s revolution in northeast Syria. Ironically, German foreign policy has probably never been as un-feminist as it is now, even if it has written out its feminist guidelines.

Ouch!

The Marxist critique of Baerbock’s self-declared feminist foreign policy:

Left-wing feminists have been formulating criticism of the government’s feminist foreign policy ever since the concept entered German political discourse. Political sociologist Rosa Burç has explained that feminist foreign policy runs the risk of “creating a new space for legitimizing interventionist foreign policy.” The feminist writer Hêlîn Dirik wrote that “a capitalist and imperialist state will not challenge the conditions that drive women and queer people worldwide into poverty, exploit them, subject them to violence and marginalize them.” It follows that it doesn’t matter whether German foreign policy calls itself feminist. Ultimately, Germany’s foreign policy interests are capitalist interests, which are based on the exploitation of the oppressed, who are often women and girls.
This self-image makes it impossible to be receptive to criticisms that point out the colonial dimensions of feminist foreign policy. It would mean taking into account the economic and social changes necessary to achieve women’s liberation. To do so would mean, in principle, dissolving or at least restructuring the purpose of the CFFP so drastically that it would no longer be seen as suitable for a seat at the table of power. The seat of power would be rightfully seen as the political opponents of a genuinely universally feminist vision for the world.

There are some valid points in the above critique, but the remedy leaves a lot to be desired!

To Jacobin, Baerbock’s feminism is little more than window-dressing:

Yet attempts to brush aside the political character of the criticism is part of the classic liberal-feminist bulwark against critiques from the Left. In the name of peace and keeping up appearances, feminists are called on to hold back on criticizing “each other.” At the end of October, it seemed that the CFFP might really be open to some criticism, declaring that it intended to address the legitimate criticism “amidst the hatred and lies,” but the post was deleted shortly thereafter, and the CFFP website has since been taken down for “maintenance.” It is unlikely that we will see an honest political debate that goes beyond addressing personal and identity-based grievances. Perhaps the best we might expect is that next time we speak about “feminist foreign policy,” a Palestinian woman will be allowed to share the stage with Baerbock.

I think that Baerbock will rue the day that she agreed to pursue this policy for the foreign office. Foreign policy is a lot harder than it seems because reality keeps getting in the way, and they also involve participants over whom you sometimes do not have any direct power.

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Canada continues to be unintentionally hilarious, all thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.

The Great White North was forever a boring place politically, but the arrival of Trudeau Jr. on the scene shook things up. One of the first things that he and his government committed themselves to was to work to improve the country’s relations with its Native tribes, both politically and especially economically. The Trudeau government invented a genocide narrative based around residential schools.1 Canada too wanted a dark aspect to its own history, so that it could share in the self-flaggellation that has coloured the recent history of its neighbour to its immediate south.

Maybe the intention here was to show these Native communities that Canada really, really did care and that by doing this, everything bad that had happened would be forgiven and forgotten? I dunno…..what I do know is that Native bands are now seeking to directly do business with China, whereby they would sell natural resources under their control to Beijing:

Canada’s indigenous communities are seeking deals with China that could give Beijing access to the country’s natural resources, despite warnings from Canadian security services over doing business with Xi Jinping’s government.
This week the Canada China Business Council indigenous trade mission is in Beijing to discuss potential energy and other business deals in a trip that could put Canada’s national “reconciliation” with its First Nation communities at odds with its national security priorities.
Karen Ogen, the trade mission’s co-chair and chief executive of the First Nations Liquefied Natural Gas Alliance, said her goal on the trip, which starts on Wednesday, was to sell LNG for the benefit of the Wet’suwet’en communities in Canada’s western province of British Columbia.
“We’ve been oppressed and repressed by our own government,” she said. “I know the history with China is not good but we have an understanding of what we need and what they need.”

Canada purposely degraded its own national sovereignty in parts of its own country in the name of “reconciliation”. Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?

Clever Chinese:

China has spotted an opportunity in the sometimes fraught relations between Canada’s national and provincial governments and indigenous groups.
In 2021, shortly after Canada imposed sanctions on Beijing over the treatment of its Uyghur population, Chinese officials began to object to the “systemic violations of Indigenous people’s rights by the US, Canada and Australia” at the UN’s Human Rights Council.
“The PRC tries to undermine trust between Indigenous communities and Canada’s government by advancing a narrative that the PRC understands and empathises with the struggles of Indigenous communities stemming from colonialism and racism,” said a spokesperson for Canada’s security intelligence service.
A 2023 CSIS report accused China’s government of employing “grey zone, deceptive and clandestine means” to influence Canadian policymaking, including Indigenous communities.
“China knows how sensitive Indigenous reconciliation is to the Trudeau government,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS intelligence analyst.

A lot of these First Nations (Native bands) reside in the west of the country. Coincidentally, Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver (located in Canada’s west), is roughly one-third Chinese in composition.

First Nations will continue to pursue these deals with the Chinese:

But CSIS remains concerned over Beijing’s possible access to resource-rich areas or geopolitically important waterways and regions such as the Arctic through First Nations groups.
“It not only undermines the government but is a way to potentially embarrass them on Canada’s past,” said Gurski.
But Matt Vickers, from Sechelt Nations land in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, who first visited China in the 1990s and is part of the CCBC delegation heading to Beijing this week, rejected the concerns of the security services.
“China now understands that for any major project to receive approval in Canada, you need First Nation consent, and not only consent but the First Nations require a majority equity play in those projects,” he said.
The CCBC is a bipartisan organisation consisting of Canada’s biggest companies, including Power Corp, which is the main sponsor of the Indigenous event.
This week’s trip marks the third time a group of Indigenous officials has travelled with the council to China in an effort to identify export markets, sources of capital and potential tourism projects.
“These missions have been developed in the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration, to help delegates better understand how China’s economy and economic development influences its desire for imports and investment opportunities,” said Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the CCBC.

It gets even funnier:

Deteriorating relations between Ottawa and Beijing meant this year’s CCBC meeting would likely be “sombre”, said former Canadian ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques.
First Nations leaders should have “very limited expectations” from the trip. “I don’t expect big business coming out of it,” he said.
But Ogen, of the First Nations LNG Alliance, said she would put the controversy surrounding the trip to Beijing aside. “I . . . look at the global energy sector, China’s need for our gas, and how I can make the best deal for my people,” she said.

Trudeau scored an own-goal.

We end this weekend’s SCR with a long read on “gonzo journalist” Hunter S. Thompson, and his brilliant work Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72:

In some respects, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trial ’72 is a savage one-man counterinsurgency. Thompson’s bimonthly Rolling Stone dispatches—later collected in book form—offered space to not only flay his favorite villain Richard Nixon, but also the double-speaking Democratic Party hacks hatching their own cynical propaganda and calculations. Over 50 years later, it’s still one of the most prophetic warnings ever written about American politics. A death letter directed at the schizophrenic duality of the national character, the slimy stock poltergeists who chronically haunt us, and our credulous need for both authenticity and artifice. It’s also a hysterical slapstick about meeting a deranged ex-Dead roadie turned acid casualty in a hotel bar, offering him your press credential, and letting the “Boohoo” run amok on Muskie’s Sunshine Special train across Florida.
At its most straightforward On the Campaign Trail remains an essential history for its shrewd political insight, guillotine prose, and immersive reporting. McGovern’s campaign director, Frank Mankiewicz, called it the “least accurate and most truthful” book about the election. But it’s best understood as a road map of spiritual tragedy and cultural decline. A bildungsroman about human limitation, our allergy to the truth, and the importance of trusting your instincts.
Things started with cautious optimism. In letters, Thompson told his Rolling Stone editor Jan Wenner that they needed to create an underground movement to unseat Nixon. In 1971, the United States passed a constitutional amendment allowing 18-year-olds the right to vote, and Thompson imagined a generational awakening that embraced both the “latent & massive Kesey-style voter with the 18-21 types.”
From the first missives, Thompson mocked the folly of pure objectivity (“the phrase itself is a pompous contradiction.”) His guiding principle was H.L. Mencken’s adage that “the only way a reporter should look at a politician is down.” But over the months shadowing the candidates, Thompson practically became a McGovern surrogate. Without compromising his honesty, the writer quixotically tried to tip the election toward the son of a Wesleyan Methodist preacher, described by Bobby Kennedy as “the most decent man in the Senate.”

Click here to read it in its entirety.

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