Okay, let’s settle this business once and for all.
When Europeans came to this continent, and as their settlements crept west, they discovered the land was already occupied. Seeing this – and had they been as ‘woke’ as some of their descendants are today – they’d have immediately got back on their boats and looked for an unoccupied continent to settle instead. But they weren’t that woke. And so they had to consider their options. Corral them, exterminate them, assimilate them, dilute their blood, a.k.a. fuck the indigenousness out of them … What was decided upon? A combination of all of the above. What was the result? What we have now.
Some people think it didn’t have to be this way. I’m sure that’s true, in the modal sense of could-have-been-otherwise. But what exactly would one of these counterfactual histories look like? And to what end would we be conjuring them up in our heads?
Take, for example, the residential schools, a.k.a. the reeducation camps. The alternative, I suppose, would have been for the colonizer to send a teacher into each village and hope that, “If you build it they will come.” That would have resulted in something very different from what we have now. Better or worse, it’s hard to say.
The colonizer could have taken the South African route, and outlawed conjugal relations between the races. That too would have resulted in something different, but not very. The colonizing nations could have dealt with these people as nation to nation. That would have resulted in something different, but in name only. And so on.
So some people – the much reviled Frances Widdowson among them – have set themselves the task of answering, So what do we all do now? She has one set of answers. Others have others. But calling one set of answers ‘racist’ and another ‘woke’ has proven singularly unhelpful. The problem on the table just is racial. And touting other people as ‘woke’ just begs the question of who’s awake and who’s still sleeping.
I have no solution, final or otherwise, to the race relations problem we’re all facing here in Canada. What we have now is ugly. It’s being made all the uglier by these second-order salvos of mindless name-calling. Francis Widdowson is no more racist than my cat is ‘woke’. He spends twenty-three hours a day sleeping, and the other hour perched on the fridge, his pedestal, looking down on his inferiors. His woken-ness doesn’t seem to be contributing much to the peace and prosperity of the household.
Categories: Editorials, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask
George Washington, as President of the newly United States of America, did in fact formalize a policy of dealing with the Indian Tribes, as they are still known in the U.S., as sovereign nations. Why this seemingly “woke” approach? Because it allowed him to use the Army to go to war against them as foreign enemies. The immediate aim of the Indian Wars was to redress the denial under Britain’s Quebec Act — one of the “Intolerable Acts” that led to the Revolution — of the rich farmland of the Ohio country, which the American colonists hemmed in by the Alleghenies had regarded as their birthright after they drove the French out. Successive Presidents repeated the pattern as the Republic advanced west.
Outcome different in name only? You think?
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No one owns anything that they cannot defend against someone who would it take it from them, whether that is an intimate relationship, a job, a promotion, a company, an industry, a piece of real estate or a whole nation state.
Nobody ever gets more than temporary license to anything…..which only lasts until someone or something comes along with a stronger claim, a better way and the means to assert its hegemony to get its way..
The current woke narrative tries to deny or obfuscate that reality, by playing a misère ideological hand where low cards are trumps. Small minorities are the perfect tool for elites that can no longer command legitimacy through class politics and so must clutch glorious defeat out of the mouth of discredited victory….and thus reverse the verdicts of history, at least for a while, as long as the bluff, crib and fudge necessary to smother reality can be made to last.
Trump and his traditionalist van are not the only buffoons on the field of battle right now. Both sides of politics are into the same kind of narrative mythologizing that reduces them to equivalent levels of collective idiocy, within a regime that is losing both its compass and grounding in reality. where faith and reason stop dancing together, such that faith becomes blind and reason is anybody’s.
These are the wages of three generations of Indulgence Capitalism, whereby a disciplined economy and culture of needs and wants is subsumed by ones of indulgently entitled fantasies of desire and their immediate satiation at any cost to commons infrastructure, which has been rolled out through systematic deregulation/degovernancing of the social system in favor of a totalitarian publicrelationsmarketingthink, the privatization of social and moral agency/accountability and the raising of adolescent exceptionalism into a principle of social administration and thought.
50-70 years of this has so thoroughly smashed all the surrounding commons infrastructure, undermined the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and the foundations of existential security, that it not only leaks sociopathy like a sieve, but cuts away at the capacity to differentiate delusionality from reality, leaving entire populations unable to differentiate between lies and truth, sectional interest narrative from disinterested honesty, and myth from authenticity.
The wokes are every bit as much a reflection of social pathology as their regime opposite numbers, who are now furiously quarrelling over the fruits of their common decay…..
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