A nation without a sovereign, save the people themselves! Our bold American experiment has provoked the hatred and wicked design of tyrants and monarchs everywhere. Yet for all that, it is not a foreign enemy that will destroy our Republic, but only we ourselves. – Thomas Paine, 1791
The people of the Canadas look south for our democratic inspiration and model, and if heaven and earth ordain it, we will form a political union with those United States rather than languish in the shackles of colonial slavery and the British Crown. – William Lyon MacKenzie, on the eve of the Upper Canada rebellion, November 1837
Let America be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. – Langston Hughes, 1937
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 door had sprung open and I was lifted on an updraft from heaven. The same wonderful freedom infused every American I met, from worn dirt farmers to my city dwelling cousins. There was nothing like it in Canada.
Over the years, I discovered that this sweet land of liberty was a spirit more than a nation, and that it arose from the oldest yearning of humanity, like a seed seeking good soil. I understood why Americans love their country so, not out of a jingoistic patriotism but from a sense of responsibility to safeguard that sacred spirit.
I learned to look past the political divisions and appearances, and honor that essence that birthed and sustained the American Republic, and that struggles now to stay alive.
It is when a civil war threatens to tear a nation apart that its people must search for their deeper unity and “better angels”, as Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans at his first inauguration in 1861. The latest conflict sundering America is giving the country the chance to do so again by first remembering how much more unites Americans than divides them.
Politicians of every stripe have a vested interest in emphasizing our differences, but we the people depend on our commonality to survive.
There is a heartfelt good will that unites Americans that transcends politics and religion: a bond that is conspicuous to me, as a spiritual and political exile from Canada. I witnessed the power of that fellowship in the spring of 2017, at a meeting of the citizens of Grant Township, Pennsylvania.
At that event, Republicans and Democrats united to pass a local Home Rule Law that overruled the state government by outlawing the dumping of toxic fracking waste on their land. That the people had taken matters into their own hands and established self-governance was as purely American as their neighborly unity.
I was raised in a Canadian culture of servitude, where children are taught to see themselves as “loyal subjects of the Crown” rather than as free citizens. That tyrannical legacy is a hard and dry soil in which our effort to plant a self-governing Republic has little room to grow. Canadians have a learned and fearful deference to authority, even when it is criminal, and blood soaked.
As an internal refugee in that imprisoned land, I am acutely aware of how America’s “bold experiment” in liberty has become so important now that despotism sits so firmly in the saddle, in the shadow of China’s growing geo-political predominance.
It is perhaps self-evident that Beijing is the only winner from the “Blue versus Red” civil war now raging in America. As the rising global power, China has skillfully entangled the USA in a proxy war in the Ukraine while gobbling up the natural resources and infrastructure across North America. Thanks to China’s client regime in Ottawa and the Trudeau government’s Foreign Investment Protection Act, the Chinese can now station their troops on Canadian soil and buy up the entire country.
Why Americans would choose to fight Russia and each other rather than unite against the far greater Chinese threat on its northern and western borders is beyond reason. Such a suicidal course has but one outcome: a new era of slavery that will extinguish the soul of America.
The Confucian-Maoist system of autocratic thought and rule 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 growing Corporatist global economy. It is also why the Vatican, as Beijing’s chief financial underwriter and the founder of the fascist-corporatist system, is so cozy with China these days.
It’s also why Canada – like Australia and Europe - is so quickly harmonizing its laws and politics to fit those of China, which is now Canada’s primary resource importer and west coast trading partner.
Today, the soul of America has become 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. And so, what is to be done?
1. End the domestic civil war. Establish an emergency coalition government between Republicans and Democrats on a joint program to reassert national and economic sovereignty.
2. End American involvement in the Ukraine conflict and open immediate negotiations with Russia.
3. Bar further Chinese takeover of the national debt and economy through legal and Constitutional measures.
4. Establish a continental political union with Canada, including annexation if necessary, and help establish an allied constitutional Republic in Canada.
5. Reduce the military budget and corporate control of government, and return political and economic power to the people through local self-governance and Home Rule.
That’s in theory. In practice, the corporatization of America and the power of the military- industrial and Chinese lobby will prevent any government in Washington from taking these measures. It is up to the people to make this vision a reality at the grassroots level: for instance, by not voting either Republican or Democrat but creating local Republic assemblies of all Americans that pass and enforce laws in their communities.
Such direct democracy is how we are struggling to build our Republic north of the imaginary border. Across Canada in different communities, in the face of growing repression, we have nullified “Crown” authority and established local Republic assemblies and courts outside the false jurisdiction of London and Ottawa.
Through such a living democracy, we are reaching out to all American patriots who together with us can forge a new political union on our continent as a bulwark of liberty against an encroaching Chinese empire. In that way, we can cause our people to experience a new birth of freedom that will once more be a shining inspiration and hope to the world.
But make haste, America and Canada. For we are well past midnight, and the dragon is at our door. We each must now choose between Liberty or Death, by word and by deed.
