The American Crisis:
Reviving the Better Angels of our Nature
by Kevin Annett
Part One of a series
One of my early memories as a boy is the joy I felt whenever we crossed the border to visit our American relatives on the Great Plains. Something in the air was different, as if a cage had been opened and a great weight removed. The same freedom infused most Americans I met. There was nothing like it in Canada.
“Here’s the difference,” my Yankee father once told me. “Americans aren’t afraid of judging things for themselves without worrying about what Big Brother might think. Canadians don’t dare do that.”
Thankfully, America’s “bold experiment” in self-governance is still around after two and a half centuries, even as it struggles for life during these times that once again try our souls. And yet the latest conflict sundering the nation is giving us the chance to recover our “better angels”, as Abraham Lincoln reminded the country in 1861. For America’s spirit of liberty transcends politics and party divisions and can mend every fracture once its people remember that what unites them is much greater than their differences.
I witnessed the power of that Union in the spring of 2017, at a meeting of the citizens of Grant Township in Pennsylvania. Republicans and Democrats in that community united to pass a Home Rule Law that overruled the state courts and government by outlawing the dumping of toxic fracking waste on their land.
The fact that these people took matters into their own hands and established local self-governance across party loyalties was as intrinsically American as their neighborly good will. Their example serves as an enduring model of what America needs to become again, at this critical moment: a grassroots peoples’ democracy rather than a system of, by, and for billionaire oligarchs.
It is perhaps self-evident that China is the only winner of the contrived “Red versus Blue” conflict that has been stoked across America. As the rising global power, China has skillfully entangled the United States in a proxy war in the Ukraine and civil unrest at home while gobbling up the natural resources and infrastructure across North America. As during the Vietnam war, America is being outthought and outmaneuvered by Asian acolytes of General Sun Tzu and his instruction to “Always provoke a stronger enemy to destroy itself and thereby defeat it without ever fighting.”
If the Democrat and Republican politicians who are tearing each other apart are not on China’s payroll, they might as well be.
Meanwhile, here on America’s strategic northern flank, thanks to China’s client regime in Ottawa and the Trudeau government’s Foreign Investment Protection Act, the Chinese are buying up Canada and stationing their police and troops on Canadian soil. This backdoor menace is matched by the weakening of the US economy by China’s owning more than $1 trillion of its national debt and Beijing’s displacement of America as the prime recipient of Canadian oil and gas.
It defies self-interest, reason, and common sense for Americans to fight each other and Russia rather than unite against the greater Chinese threat. Such a suicidal course is fatally weakening American sovereignty and endangering its existence.
The Confucian-Maoist system of autocracy has no room for democracy, free conscience, or common law. Rule by decree and political conformity is the only game in town, which makes China a perfect medium and midwife for the encroaching global Corporatist system. It is also why the Vatican, as Beijing’s chief financial underwriter and the original architect of fascist corporatism, is one of China’s major partners in crime.
Today, America is as besieged as it was in the years following its revolution, when it stood alone against a world of absolutist monarchs. The times not only try our souls but imperil them. For if America falls, so does the equality, liberty, and independence that are the birthright of men and women everywhere; and that calamity will have been caused by no-one other than Americans.
There is still time to avoid disaster. We must start by ending the domestic civil war and joining hands across the political divide with these measures:
1. In the 2024 federal election, Americans should vote to establish an emergency coalition government of Republicans and Democrats on a common program to reassert national sovereignty and economic independence. If the politicians refuse to do so, it is up to the people to forge that Union at the grassroots level by creating local Republic assemblies of all Americans that enact and enforce laws in their own communities.
2. America must withdraw from the war in the Ukraine and focus its military preparedness on the inevitable clash with China.
3. America’s national security requires the formation of a continental political union with an independent constitutional Republic in Canada. The establishment of such a Republic is supported by two-thirds of Canadians in a national poll conducted in March 2021.
Joining hands across the border in a common Republic is an old idea in both our countries. During the aborted uprising against the British Crown in 1837, Canadian rebel leader William Lyon MacKenzie wrote,
The people of the Canadas look south for our democratic inspiration and model, and if heaven and earth ordain it, we shall form a political union with those United States of America rather than languish in the shackles of colonial slavery and a perfidious British monarchy.
Or in our case, a Chinese invader.
We are laying the basis for such a continental Republic on our side of the border. Across Canada in many communities, we are nullifying “Crown” authority and establishing local Republic assemblies and common law courts outside the false jurisdiction of London and Ottawa and their partners in Beijing.
Through such a living democracy, we are reaching out to all American patriots who together with us can forge a continental Republic as a bulwark of liberty against an encroaching Chinese empire. In that way, we can help our people experience a new birth of freedom and independence that will once again be a shining inspiration and model for the world.
We are well past midnight and the dragon is at our door. We each must choose between Liberty or Death.
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Kevin Annett, M.A., M.Div., is a leader of the movement to establish a constitutional Republic in Canada. He is an award-winning scholar, author, and activist who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his quarter-century campaign to expose and prosecute genocide by Canadian Church and State.
His websites include
This article is the first in a series entitled The American Crisis, written in the spirit of its namesake by Thomas Paine to revive the hearts and sharpen the minds of a struggling people.
Kevin Annett (left) speaking at a Republic of Kanata rally in Vancouver, May 2021.
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Sarah J. Webster is a syndicated journalist and a resource person and adviser to alternative media networks on three continents. She has been nominated for journalism excellence awards on numerous occasions.
